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C o n t e m p o r a ry M a j o r i t y N a t i o n a l i s m
studies in nationalism and ethnic conflict General Editors: Sid Noel, Richard Vernon Studies in Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict examines the political dimensions of nationality in the contemporary world. The series includes both scholarly monographs and edited volumes that consider the varied sources and political expressions of national identities, the politics of multiple loyalty, the domestic and international effects of competing identities within a single state, and the causes of – and political responses to – conflict between ethnic and religious groups. The books are designed for use by university students, scholars, and interested general readers. The editors welcome inquiries from authors. If you are in the process of completing a manuscript that you think might fit into the series, you are invited to contact them. 1 Nationalism and Minority Identities in Islamic Societies Edited by Maya Shatzmiller 2 From Power Sharing to Democracy Post-conflict Institutions in Ethnically Divided Societies Edited by Sid Noel 3 Bringing Power to Justice? The Prospects of the International Criminal Court Edited by Joanna Harrington, Michael Milde, Richard Vernon 4 National Identity and the Varieties of Capitalism The Experience of Denmark Edited by John L. Campbell, John A. Hall, Ove K. Pedersen 5 Parallel Paths The Development of Nationalism in Ireland and Quebec Garth Stevenson 6 Reconciliation(s) Transitional Justice in Postconflict Societies Edited by Joanna R. Quinn 7 Contemporary Majority Nationalism Edited by Alain-G. Gagnon, André Lecours, and Geneviève Nootens
Contemporary Majority Nationalism Edited by
Alain-G. Gagnon, André Lecours, and Geneviève Nootens
McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca
© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2011 isbn 978-0-7735-3825-2 (cloth) isbn 978-0-7735-3826-9 (paper) Legal deposit second quarter 2011 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Université du Québec à Montréal. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Contemporary majority nationalism / edited by Alain-G. Gagnon, André Lecours, and Geneviève Nootens. (Studies in nationalism and ethnic conflict) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7735-3825-2 (bound). – ISBN 978-0-7735-3826-9 (pbk.) 1. Nationalism. 2. Ethnicity. I. Gagnon, Alain-G. (Alain-Gustave), 1954– II. Lecours, André, 1972– III. Nootens, Geneviève, 1967– IV. Series: Studies in nationalism and ethnic conflict HM753.C67 2011
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C2010-907744-X
This book was typeset by Interscript in 10.5/13 Sabon.
Contents
Preliminary Notes Alain-G. Gagnon
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1 Understanding Majority Nationalism 3 André Lecours and Geneviève Nootens Part one
Theoretical Considerations
2 The Paradoxes of Contemporary Nationalism Alain Dieckhoff
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3 Imagined Nations: Personal Identity, National Identity, and the Places of Memory 43 Àngel Castiñera 4 Cultural Diversity and Modernity: The Conditions of the Vivre Ensemble 80 Louis Dupont 5 National Majorities in New States: Managing the Challenge of Diversity 101 John Coakley Part two
Case Studies
6 British and French Nationalisms Facing the Challenges of European Integration and Globalization 127 John Loughlin
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Contents
7 Janus Faces, Rocks, and Hard Places: Majority Nationalism in Canada 144 James Bickerton 8 The Reality of American Multiculturalism: American Nationalism at Work 181 Liah Greenfeld 9 Autonomy and Multinationality in Spain: Twenty-Five Years of Constitutional Experience 197 Enric Fossas References
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Contributors
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Preliminary Notes
Since the eighteenth century nationalism has been approached in many different ways. A liberating phenomenon when the first nationstates emerged and in the springtime of peoples, nationalism subsequently came to be seen as both progressive and reactionary and as both conservative and liberal. Clearly, nationalism’s borders have not always been well defined. Is it a social movement, a historical construction, a class struggle, a decolonization phenomenon, or a political ideology? The meanings we give to nationalism and its forms of expression have varied depending on the period and the context. In liberal democracies today it is useful to study nationalism from the angle of power relations among communities and their relationship to the state. Thus, we can speak of majority nationalism in Canada, Spain, and France, and minority nationalism in Catalonia, Scotland, and Québec. The protagonists of majority nationalism most often drape themselves in patriotic discourse to protect existing nationstates and to oppose all other expressions of nationalism. Defenders of minority nationalism challenge the very existence of established states in so far as the latter do not recognize them as full cultural and sociological nations. Each side feeds off the other, while at the same time trying to base its nation-building process on universal foundations inspired by the humanist values inherited from the Enlightenment. For more than a decade and a half, the members of the Groupe de recherche sur les sociétés plurinationales (GRSP) have been trying to gain a better understanding of the conditions underlying the relations among nations within contemporary Western states. GRSP members have produced a number of academic works in keeping with a multidisciplinary approach inspired by law, philosophy, and political science. First, there have been theoretical explorations of the advent of the
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multination, which has been intended to meet the needs of national communities living within nation-states, communities that have been profoundly different from one another on the societal level. Publications in this vein include Multinational Democracies (Gagnon and Tully 2001) and The Conditions of Diversity in Multinational Democracies (Gagnon, Guibernau, and Rocher 2003). Major work has also been done on identity construction by national communities. Publications along these lines include Quebec Identity: The Challenge of Pluralism (Maclure 2003) and Repères en mutation: Identité et citoyenneté dans le Québec contemporain (Maclure and Gagnon 2001). In addition to these studies, there have been in-depth analyses of the whys and wherefores of transformations of democracy in states where there is deep diversity. Two of the many publications on this topic are Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (Tully 1995) and Désenclaver la démocratie: Des huguenots à la paix des Braves (Nootens 2004). While their approach has its roots in political philosophy, these works have benefited greatly from the contributions of legal theorists, who have explored the origins of central political authorities’ attempts to standardize norms, as can be seen in Appartenances, institutions, et citoyenneté (Noreau and Woehrling 2005). Moreover, team members have often compared the cases of Catalonia, Scotland, and Québec so as to gain a better understanding of the issues concerning political representation, federal citizenship, and deep diversity. Some of the books published by researchers who have been participating in the GRSP since 1994 include Pour la liberté d’une société distincte (Laforest 2004),1 Basque Nationalism (Lecours 2007), and The Case for Multinational Federalism (Gagnon 2010). The present project is in continuity with those just mentioned, although it also differs in that its purpose is to deepen our understanding of the links between majority nationalism and minority nationalism. The analyses gathered here shed completely new light on the foundations of majority nationalism by simultaneously exploring identity issues, places of memory, and power relations in states where there is deep diversity. Contributors include theorists from the United States, Britain, Canada, France, and Spain who have dedicated much of their academic work to the study of majority nationalism in their own countries and to the resulting experiences with it. The analyses by James Bickerton, Àngel Castiñeira, Alain Dieckhoff, Louis Dupont, Enric Fossas, Liah Greenfeld, and John Loughlin, and by my colleagues André Lecours and Geneviève Nootens are both penetrating and unindulgent towards established
Preliminary Notes
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powers. I would like to express my great gratitude to all the authors for agreeing to present their work to the public and for revising their contributions in accordance with the comments expressed during forums and by anonymous assessors of this project. The academic contribution of our GRSP colleagues to the present initiative should be given special notice because they commented on the texts and verified the translations for the French and English editions. Many thanks to André Lecours and François Rocher (University of Ottawa), Guy Laforest and Jocelyn Maclure (Laval University), Pierre Noreau and José Woehrling (Université de Montréal), Geneviève Nootens (Université du Québec à Chicoutimi), and James Tully (University of Victoria) for their support in producing this work. Before crossing the border separating policy from politics by joining the Action démocratique du Québec (ADQ) in February 2000, Guy Laforest actively participated in the GRSP’s work and explored the ideas underlying communitarian liberalism and liberal nationalism. Fortunately for us, Laforest came back to the research team in full spirit in 2009. Since the mid-1990s, the GRSP’s work has received financial support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and the Fonds québécois de recherche sur la société et la culture (FQRSC, formerly the Fonds de chercheurs et aide à la recherche). Our thanks go to these two funding agencies and, for the present publication, to the Canada Research Chair in Québec and Canadian Studies (CREQC), which helped to organize the series of public conferences that preceded the writing of this book. We would also like to use this opportunity to thank the Québec Delegations in Paris and London, the Spanish Consulate in Canada, and the International Association of Québec Studies (AIEQ) for their financial support for public events. Furthermore, we also express our thanks to Olivier De Champlain and Arjun Tremblay for all their hard work in preparing this edition and to Mary Baker for her long-term complicity in assisting the CREQC in its various projects. Our thanks go as well to Ron Curtis for copy-editing and to Susanne McAdam for seeing the work through production. Finally, we would like to thank Philip Cercone, as well as Sid Noel and Richard Vernon, the editors of this series specializing in Nationalism and Ethic Conflict, for their belief in this project. Alain-G. Gagnon Director, Groupe de recherche sur les sociétés plurinationales
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1 Understanding Majority Nationalism André Lecours and Geneviève Nootens
In liberal democratic societies, nationalism has long been associated with minorities and opposition to the state. The phenomenon has indeed often manifested itself most visibly in challenges to the central state. The nationalism projected by states, to the contrary, has either remained relatively hidden or has been granted a legitimacy denied to minority nationalist movements. For example, it typically goes without saying from the perspective of states that they may choose an official language for the public sphere and that this choice is therefore obfuscated as a meaningful expression of nationalism. The legitimacy of a similar choice by minority nations, however, is often challenged. Hence, patriotism is said to refer to a legitimate defence of the state (and is sometimes associated with universal values), whereas nationalism has been viewed as an attempt to destroy it. Minority nationalism has been the subject of numerous studies in the past fifteen years.1 The significant interest in this phenomenon reflects a determination to analyze the resurgence and/or persistence of the demands of minority nations in the context of globalization. Some of those studies are intended to refute the biases that treat nationalism as a reactionary phenomenon resisting modernity (see, for example, Keating 2001a,b; Maclure and Gagnon 2001). The international context also helps to explain this interest. The end of the Cold War led to the dismantling of the Soviet Union amidst nationalist demands and opened the way to major conflicts in the Balkans and the Caucasus. In Western societies, the Québécois, Scottish, Basque, Catalan, and Flemish nationalist movements continue to express themselves vigorously. Over the last few years,
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Belgium and the United Kingdom have witnessed changes to their political structure following Flemish and Scottish mobilization.2 Catalonia’s new Statute of Autonomy (2006) includes, among other things, more fiscal powers and the recognition of the fact that its inhabitants attribute a national character to the region. Québec nationalism claims the recognition of the nation québécoise and a revision of Canadian federalism, if not independence. In Australia and New Zealand, as is the case in Canada, Aboriginal peoples claim self-government and a fairer distribution of resources on the grounds that they were organized societies before European colonization. In Europe, the development of human rights regimes has drawn attention to the condition of several minorities (Keating 2004; Tierney 2005); in parallel, there has been (notably at the OSCE) a growing awareness of the fact that a focus on human rights does not necessarily enable the integration of minorities into public life.3 Politics is therefore strongly structured by movements disputing the way their community has been integrated into the state. This makes minority nationalism one of the most important vectors of contemporary political controversy. However, a thorough understanding of nationalism also requires the examination of its less visible manifestation, that is, when it is projected by the central, consolidated state. In this case, we call it “majority nationalism.” We challenge the idea that the state’s association with nationalism in liberal democratic societies ended at the turn of the twentieth century. For example, in 1992 Juan Linz mentioned that he knew of no one who had written or could write a book on Spanish nationalism (Flynn 2001, 708), since it seemed to be a non-subject for researchers.4 We believe that this type of blatantly erroneous premise – the idea that there is nothing for scholars of nationalism to study in the action of the contemporary liberaldemocratic state – impedes a serious analysis of majority nationalism. The aim of the current book is precisely to unveil the normative, institutional, and cultural dimensions of the relationship between the state, the majority nation, minority nations, and cultural diversity resulting from immigration. In this introduction, we delineate the phenomenon of majority nationalism and attempt to grasp how it expresses itself. The first section presents an overview of the research on majority nationalism, the second section specifies the nature of this type of nationalism, and the third analyzes its main modes of action and manifestations.
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Majority Nationalism: The State of the Field The work of the pioneers of scholarly research on nationalism featured an analytical point of view favouring the consideration of the nationalism of majority groups. For example, in his reflections on civic and ethnic nationalism Hans Kohn dealt with, among others, the subject of German, French, and Dutch nationalisms (1944). Studies in this tradition have examined the nationalism of states in the context of inter-state (international) relations. Other researchers have attempted to explain how nations (underpinned by states) have been built. Karl Deutsch (1966) and Ernest Gellner (1983) developed functionalist arguments that emphasized the necessity for modern societies to have dense networks of “social communication” through the diffusion of a “high culture.” According to Deutsch, the national community rests on the intensity of the interactions between its members. The level of such communication is assessed by indicators viewed as attesting to a more or less significant level of social mobilization, such as rates of urbanization, the proportion of the workforce in secondary and tertiary sectors, newspaper readership, or the number of students in the population. Those studies, which can be located in the so-called modernist tradition, emphasize nation-building through the state. Their authors stress the modes of emergence and consolidation of several significant structural and institutional characteristics of the modern state (see, for example, Tilly 1975, 1990); to that extent, they constitute a fundamental contribution to understanding how national states have been established. However, they usually focus exclusively on the institutional (i.e., the state) or the material (the means of communication, and so on) manifestations of national feelings. Moreover, this scholarship features the conviction that modernization will bring about the decline of ethnic idiosyncrasies and the assimilation of minority groups by the dominant group: the establishment of the state will unavoidably bring the disappearance of groups that consider themselves nations but that are otherwise deprived of state institutions.5 Consequently, the nature of the relationships between the state as an institutional structure, on the one hand, and majority and minority nations, on the other hand, is not truly analyzed in this tradition. In other words, “modernists” focus on the historical processes that lead to congruence between the state and the majority group when they do not simply take for granted such congruence.
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One consequence is that majority nationalism is not readily identified as nationalism once a large part of the population has been integrated. As a result, some fundamental sociological and normative aspects of majority nationalism remain hidden, which means that the modernist approach does not allow us to fully understand how state nationalism actively seeks to ensure the allegiance of historical minority groups. During the 1980s, the opponents of the modernist approach emphasized the sociocultural characteristics of groups rather than political-institutional aspects. They too focused on the construction of large nations and of European states (Armtrong 1982). This approach (characterized as “perennialist” or “ethno-symbolist”) devoted itself to demonstrating the continuity between pre-modernity and modernity in the emergence of nations (Hastings 1997). The work of Anthony Smith, Eric Kaufmann, and Rogers Brubaker, among others, embodies this perspective. Smith (1986) argues that nations are built around an ethnic core whose influence remains present for a long time. Building on Smith’s work, Kaufmann has developed the idea of dominant ethnicity in order to grasp the influence of majority groups on the nationalisms projected by states or regional governments (2004a). Despite the sharp distinction that he draws between nationalism and dominant ethnicity, the latter idea has allowed researchers to unveil the cultural aspects of nationalisms that are often presented as being “neutral” or civic. Kaufmann has thus been able to show, for example, the wasp (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) influence on America’s nationbuilding (2004b). Brubaker developed a concept close to that of “dominant ethnicity,” namely that of “nationalizing nationalism.” Nationalizing nationalism articulates claims made in the name of the core nation, which is defined in ethnocultural terms and which considers itself the rightful “owner” of the state. Thus Central and Eastern European states, after the dismantling of the Soviet empire, undertook processes of national consolidation in the name of a core nation and justified them by highlighting perceived cultural, economic, or demographic weaknesses within the country (Brubaker 1996, 5). The concepts of dominant ethnicity and of nationalizing nationalism can contribute to a better understanding of majority nationalism. However, they suffer from significant limitations to the extent that they are highly cultural. In the case of dominant ethnicity, in
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particular, identity and the political projects it sustains are perceived as being heavily determined by ethnic origin or, at least, by a belief in a common ethnic origin. These concepts can therefore provide for a limited perspective on nationalisms that, despite unifying the members of the majority group more tightly, are nonetheless established on bi- or multicultural bases or incorporate some cultural characteristics of the minority group(s). Contemporary Canadian nationalism, for example, cannot be perceived as the mere extension of a Protestant Anglophone ethnic core, since it builds partly on bilingualism and multiculturalism. Similarly, British identity cannot be solely understood through its English “core,” since it incorporates multinational bases and the idea of a union between national entities. What, then, is majority nationalism?
Uncovering and Conceptualizing Majority Nationalism We have emphasized that one of the problems raised by the analysis of majority nationalism is that it is not always clearly analyzed as nationalism. In fact, majority nationalism is concealed in at least two ways: first, it is concealed by the fact that “strengthening the allegiance to the state is seen as the expression of a legitimate national feeling, namely, patriotism, while, conversely, contesting the state is invariably dismissed as the manifestation of a reactionary trend, namely, nationalism” (Dieckhoff 2000, 159; our translation). Second, it is also concealed by the fact that the state usually claims to be the locus of egalitarian relationships with and between citizens (Dieckhoff 2000, 160). Both aspects call for some comments. It must first be stressed that in the social sciences and political philosophy, majority nationalism has sometimes vanished thanks to the debatable distinction between patriotism and nationalism, which treats allegiance to the nation as projected by the state as patriotism rather than nationalism (Connor 2004, 39). According to Viroli, for example, patriotism values the republic and its liberty, while nationalism values the spiritual and cultural unity of the people and hence requires unconditional loyalty (1995, 2). Patriotism would thus be more compatible with universalism and more tolerant of diversity. The appeal of patriotism’s latest variations lies precisely in their insistence on the vision of a postnational community united by a combination of loyalty towards universal liberal principles, on the one
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hand, and particularistic commitments, on the other (Canovan 2000, 281). However, following Canovan, we argue that such a contradistinction is artificial. “Nationalism” and “patriotism” both refer to feelings of solidarity towards a territorial community seen as the bearer of a distinct political status that allows it to determine its own future (in other words, self-government). Canovan rightfully stresses that the patriot does not stand up for the rights of just anyone but for those of his or her fellow citizens (1996, 93).6 The distinction between nationalism and patriotism is all the more deceptive for two reasons. First, patriotism still requires inculcating in citizens a number of values and principles. Second, it takes for granted the existence of a historical political community, thus overstating the contrast between “pre-political” ties and political relations between citizens (Canovan 2000, 281–7). Hence, nationalism can be associated with challenges to the state as well as with a defence of it. And whether it is expressed through the state, regional political institutions, political parties, or civil society organizations, nationalism is always embedded in a twofold dynamic coupling inclusion with exclusion. Swiss nationalism, for example, makes a significant differentiation between the rights and privileges of individuals living on Swiss territory depending on whether they are citizens or foreigners (Wimmer 2004, 51).7 Moreover, depicting the state as the locus of egalitarian relationships with and between citizens does not necessarily address the needs of national minorities and minority nations. Let us remember that policies of state consolidation can be implemented at the expense of national minorities without necessarily violating individual rights stricto sensus; infra-state units may be delineated so that national minorities cannot form a local majority (Kymlicka and Straehle 1999). Kymlicka has denounced what he labels “the myth of ethnocultural neutrality,” namely the assumption that the state is neutral with respect to the cultural characteristics of its citizens. He rightly stresses that all liberal democracies have used the majority’s “societal culture” to consolidate the state, albeit to varying degrees. Rather than affirming neutrality, then, such an undertaking has gone hand in hand with the repression of ethnocultural diversity or its “benign neglect” (2000, 185; see also Sunstein 1993). Examples are plentiful: the ban in post-revolutionary France on some regional languages, particularly in schools, the redrawing of Florida’s borders during the nineteenth century in order to put the local Hispanic majority in a
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minority position, and massive migration in the historical territories of some minorities (in Tibet, for example) (Kymlicka and Straehle 1999; see also Hagège 2000 and Thiesse 1999). In “societies of the New World” (Bouchard 2001), the diffusion of the majority culture has been particularly harmful for Aboriginal populations since it has been linked with a disdain for societies endowed with ancient and specific traditions and political institutions. As James Tully (1995) shows, John Locke used the distinction between the state of nature and political societies to justify the appropriation of American land by Europeans and the wars against Aboriginal populations. Therefore, the myth of ethnocultural neutrality has clearly been used to legitimate the presumed difference between the use of culture to consolidate the central state and the use of culture by minorities to challenge this order. What is to be gained from these observations with respect to the analysis of majority nationalism? First, it must be understood that the distinction between majority and minority nationalism is not so much a difference in nature. Nationalism makes the nation a political subject and claims for it some degree of self-determination; in this respect, minority and majority nationalisms embody the same kind of political claims. Similarly, culture constitutes a political resource for all forms of nationalism: it is used either to legitimize the established order (majority nationalism) or to challenge it (minority nationalism).8 If this is the case, it must be acknowledged (1) that minority nationalism cannot be identified as a backward phenomenon that contradicts modernity, unless the same can be said of majority nationalism, and (2) that nationalism does not solely result from minority movements, nor did it come to an end in Western societies with the stabilization of state-building at the turn of the twentieth century. Some forms of majority nationalism are without a doubt more accommodating than others. It should nonetheless be stressed that denying the legitimacy of minority nationalist movements relates directly to the significance of the idea of the nation in the modern conception of political legitimacy. In Western modernity, political legitimacy lies with the community of citizens understood as a nation. Hence, existing states have all the reason to deny minority groups the same status that they themselves enjoy and on which rests, in principle, access to sovereignty in the current inter-state system (Jackson Preece 1998; Tamir 1993; Nootens 2004). This is why states must be able to present themselves as nations (communities of
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interests and solidarity) and why they can hardly recognize other (minority) nations within their borders. This discussion calls for additional specifications. One of the fundamental distinctions between nationality and other forms of community is the aspiration for self-determination viewed as an inherent (original) right (Keating 2001b, 83). Nationalist claims are based on the argument that the nation has historically developed as a selfdetermining community, as a people that wants to decide on its future as a community (Keating 2001a, 204).9 Nationalism uses cultural and political resources, sometimes to consolidate the state, sometimes to contest it, but nationalism always expresses itself around the claim for self-government. Similarly, the relationships between culture and politics conveyed by the modern idea of the nation are also more complex than what is implied by the common distinction between cultural and political nations. Moreover, it has become commonplace to accept that nations are constructed10 and that they draw at once on subjective and objective characteristics whose respective weight varies from case to case. This has contributed to making the nation a fluid object, paradoxically easy to spot but difficult to define.11 In all cases, however, individuals constitute a nation not in accordance with personal similarities but rather because they share something that acts as a mediating force between them (Canovan 1996, 71). Nations are therefore fundamentally phenomena of the public sphere. The projects of majority nationalism, revolving around issues of identity and mobilization, are articulated mainly through the mediation of the central state’s institutions. Majority nationalism is associated with policies of nation-building, policies put to work by the central state in order to give citizens a language, a culture, and/or a common identity.12 It is thus articulated through the state. Majority nationalism can tolerate more or less flexible representations of the nation, notably in relation to the capacity of minority nations to negotiate certain institutional aspects of the consolidated state. It therefore does not necessarily entail the transfer of the majority group’s cultural characteristics to the nation as projected by the state. Majority nationalism nonetheless consists in the articulation of a national community that usually has its core within the majority group and/or within the representations of the state’s national identity as that group sees it (notably through the elites). It is, therefore, mainly and most strongly associated with the members of this group.
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These representations are obviously likely to change over time as a function, among other things, of shifts in relations of power and dominant worldviews. In the case of Canadian nationalism it should be mentioned that since 1949 (when appeals to the Privy Council in London were completely abolished), judicial interpretation in constitutional matters appears to have become less favourable to the provinces. In a similar way, the repatriation of the constitution of 1981–82 is perceived by a majority of Quebecois as a unilateral repatriation that modified the rules of the constitutional game without their consent.
Majority Nationalism’s Modes of Action and Manifestations The mechanisms for the promotion, reproduction, and expression of majority nationalism in Western states are diverse. Nevertheless, it is possible to distinguish broad categories: education systems, military service, wars, and colonialism; political practices, traditions, and institutions; and the use of myths and symbols. Majority nationalism is anchored in history: it is linked to European and North American state-building and the consolidation processes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this context, it can be seen in terms of nation-building (Eisenstat and Rokkan 1973). Majority nationalism still expresses itself in the contemporary era through active nationbuilding (for example, in Canada and in Spain), as well as in more routine expressions of national identity. Historically, majority nationalism owes much to compulsory staterun education systems, which often sustained linguistic assimilation. In France teaching in languages other than French remained largely outlawed from the revolutionary and post-revolutionary period until the 1970s, only to then undergo a significant development in the 1990s. National (state) education systems generally guided the socialization of the youth to dominant norms, including identity features. Rewriting “national” history enabled the state to convey the (imaginary) vision of a common past and of a homogeneous community. From this perspective, the creation of mass education in France in the 1870s, compared to its later establishment in Spain, partly explains the different levels of integration of the Basque populations to dominant identities (Mansvelt Beck 2005). Control over educational curricula in language and history remains a vital
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concern for many states, with the exception of those possessing a more decentralized federal structure in the area of education (Belgium, Canada). In those latter cases, education is less easily used as a tool to foster national cohesion (although the Canadian government does seek to intervene in higher education). The military (through wars, conquests, conscription) also contributed to the building of national identities. Mandatory military service helped to make citizens members of the national community. Not only did the army help to diffuse the dominant language, it also conveyed a strong sense of national solidarity. In fact, the army may be viewed as a microcosm of the homogenous nation the state sought to create (see, for example, Greenfeld’s comments on the role of the Israeli army in this respect, below). The crystallization of state national identities also resulted from war, which radicalized the role played by alterity in self-representations of the nation. In analyzing the building of British and French identities, one cannot neglect the significance of the conflicts between these two states. Moreover, wars most often generate very strong pressures for social conformity, at the heart of which lies national solidarity as conceived of by political elites. Accordingly, the state’s consolidation in Western Europe between 1870 and 1914 included “the attempt to provide a degree of popular legitimacy for the relations of power crystallized in the nation-state, though the precise formula – extensions of the suffrage, representative institutions, social and educational reforms – varied from case to case. Common to all these settings, however, was the importance of nationalism, now refashioned from a revolutionary ideology partly inspired by democratic idealism into one which demanded loyalty to the national-state” (Jenkins and Sofos 1996, 20). On a more empirical level, war involves a shift towards a more conservative viewpoint in the adaptation of the citizenship model in order to integrate the subordinate classes into the social order and to promote their loyalty to the existing state. From this perspective, “everything was done to cultivate the image of socially undifferentiated citizenry defined first and foremost by their membership of a ‘nation.’ To this end, states sought to foster a sense of national community” (Jenkins and Sofos 1996, 20). The idea that war acts as a formative and consolidating force for national identity is also observed in the security concerns that have characterized American policy since September 2001. The notion of national security shows the tight link between state integrity, the
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protection of citizens, and the nation. In a period where the threat seems omnipresent, the central state suddenly acquires greater importance in its citizens’ lives because it is in charge of their protection. The nation projected by the state is more salient, as well as more exclusive for those whose loyalty is perceived as doubtful and who are regarded as posing a risk (see the provisions of the Patriot Act). Finally, European states’ military power also enabled the development of colonial empires,13 whose political glory and economic opportunities often seduced the members of minority groups. The Scottish bourgeoisie, for example, benefited from the British Empire. More broadly, the empire served to promote and diffuse British national identity in Scotland. In Spain, the development of Basque and Catalan nationalisms at the end of the nineteenth century and the failure of the Spanish nation-building project were facilitated by the end of Spain’s glory embodied in the loss of the empire (Storm 2004). The historical process of state-building also resulted in distinctive conceptions of power and political authority, which are embodied in political and constitutional practices. British identity is well anchored in political institutions: it relates to the constitutional monarchy and the supremacy of Parliament. The historian Arthur Aughey argues that constitutionalism acted as a substitute for British nationalism (2001, 49). The ambiguous attitude of the British towards stronger European integration revolves around the role played by constitutionalism in their identity. As for the French nation, it is associated with the values, traditions, and political institutions of republicanism (Schnapper 1991), which contrast sharply with British constitutionalism by their formal, uniform, symmetrical and centralizing character. Contemporary Spanish nationalism is deeply anchored in the constitution of 1978, which is considered the key to the new Spanish democracy and to the “normalization” of the country.14 In Canada, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, adopted in 1982, constitutes the expression of Canadian nationalism, along with bilingualism and multiculturalism. In the United States, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are the central parameters of national political identity. These expressions of majority nationalism are neither static nor free from contradictions. Gérard Bouchard writes that the nation-state is, in fact, a “formidable ideological mixture, heterogeneous and contradictory, born out of the confluence of diverse philosophical and
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cultural streams, capable of accommodating the most various traditions and collective visions” (2003, 53–4, our translation). The nationstate’s components are linked with one another within varying configurations; its ideological set-up therefore constitutes “a remarkable example of an organic thought that owes most of its traits to compromises, fortuitous and unexpected (if not unnatural) assemblages, illusory symmetries, strategic swings and functional incoherencies supported by a range of myths” (56, our translation). Indeed, majority nationalism also unfolds and expresses itself through the creation of symbols and narratives.15 Spanish nationalism invokes the Reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula by the Catholic monarchs at the expense of the Moors. American nationalism is anchored in a narrative emphasizing the unity of the first colonies during the War of Independence. It also largely depends on the myth of social mobility (see Greenfeld, this volume, chapter 8). The power of majority nationalism lies in the efficiency and the extent of this creation of myths and symbols. The success of the national project in France compared to its failure in Spain at the turn of the twentieth century seems to have had much to do with the fact that France was more capable than the Spanish state of producing monuments, hymns, and flags that were apt to rally the nation. These symbols are important because they tend to become lasting markers of national identity, even when they are barely noticed. They fall under what Michael Billig labels “banal” nationalism: a nationalism that is expressed through the internalization of everyday references to the nation that become so customary that they are eventually not noticeable. For example, banal nationalism operates through identification papers (passports) and events such as national holidays and international sport competitions, or even through the geographical depictions used by televised weather reports.16 Finally, the welfare state has also contributed greatly to consolidating these representations of the nation in many Western countries during the twentieth century. The extension of citizenship to include social rights connected national identity with new redistributive practices linked to ideals of equality and universalism, redeploying at the same time the components of state national identity.17 Since social policies are fertile ground for the expression of common values and priorities, they can, as a result, become fundamental national symbols. In Canada, federal politicians often present the public health system as a proof that Canada’s character is distinct from that of the
Understanding Majority Nationalism
15
United States. The role of social policies in stimulating allegiance to the nation also helps to explain the political struggles that take place over the control of social welfare between politicians from different levels of government within multinational states (Béland and Lecours 2005). The contributions to this book consider many of these mechanisms for the construction and expression of majority nationalism. These contributions serve to provide much-anticipated clarification on the relationship between majority and minority nations by fundamentally exploring the means by which the core nation operates and by weighing the strategies developed by national communities that are in a minority situation. This constitutes an essential contribution towards a stronger comprehension of a phenomenon that too often remains exclusively identified with the contestation by minorities of their terms of integration to the state – a contestation that for long has been judged to be retrograde and to run against the current of modernity. Nationalism constitutes one of the most significant political phenomena of modernity. Far from being the monopoly of reactionary, closed minorities, nationalism is an integral part of state institutions and policies and serves as well to nourish the attitudes of the majority. We cannot turn a blind eye to this fact if we wish to adequately comprehend contemporary political and social relations and to think about the bases of “living together” in the present era.
notes 1 Among those studies is the work of the Research Group on Plurinational Societies (GRSP), which has edited books on minority nationalisms, their normative foundations, and accommodation strategies available to state authorities (Noreau and Woehrling 2005; Gagnon and Tully 2001; Gagnon, Guibernau, and Rocher 2003). In addition, Michael Keating and John McGarry have analyzed minority nationalism in relation to globalization and the building of the European Union (2001). Minority nationalisms have also been studied in comparative analyses undertaken by authors seeking to identify differences and similarities between cases (Keating 1997; Murphy and Catt 2002; Keating 2001c). There are many studies on the cases of Quebec (Seymour 1999; Bouchard 2001), Scotland (McCrone 2001), Catalonia (McRoberts 2001; Guibernau 2004), the Basque Country (Mansvelt Beck 2005) and Flanders (Wils 1996).
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2 The federalization of Belgium began in 1970, while “devolution” in the United Kingdom goes back to 1999. 3 OSCE, Lund Recommendations. However, the states themselves are reluctant to acknowledge the collective rights of national minorities and minority nations and to admit the existence of their own (majority) nationalism. This would raise the issue of equality between citizens and compel the states to publicly tackle the issue of power relationships between national communities within states. 4 There is a new literature on Spanish nationalism. See, for example, Núñez (2001). 5 Benedict Anderson’s work (1991) is also based on communication processes but stresses the significance of the development of publishing technologies and the emergence of a “print capitalism.” 6 For example, Viroli writes that “to move our compatriots to commit themselves to the common liberty of their people we have to appeal to feelings of compassion and solidarity that are – when they are – rooted in bonds of language, culture, and history” (1995 10). Canovan stresses that the version of liberal nationalism that Miller endorses (which makes national identity the essential prerequisite for sustaining the trust and solidarity needed for republican citizenship) and the Virolian conceptualization of patriotism are nearly the same (2000 289). 7 Wimmer uses the expression “dominant nationhood” to characterize the cases of state nationalism where there is an overlap between nation, citizenship, and sovereignty. 8 Gans distinguishes state nationalism from cultural nationalism. The former “focuses on the contribution that national cultures can make towards the realization of political values that are neither derived from nor directed at the protection of particular national cultures” (2003 2). The latter stresses that “members of groups sharing a common history and societal culture have a fundamental, morally significant interest in adhering to their culture and in sustaining it across generations” (7). According to Gans, there is therefore a difference between state nationalism and cultural nationalism. In order to shed light on the hidden aspects of majority nationalism, we instead choose to emphasize the commonalities between majority and minority nationalisms. 9 The modern idea of nation conveys a fundamental change in the source of political legitimacy. With the erosion of ancien régime societies, legitimacy instead belonged with the people. However, because of the gap at the heart of democratic theory (the people are the source of legitimacy, but they cannot resolve the issue of their own legitimacy) modern doctrines of popular
Understanding Majority Nationalism
17
sovereignty relate sovereignty to the nation (Yack 2001). The nation therefore constitutes the social and cultural basis of citizenship. 10 In the last thirty years, essentialist models of culture have been the target of significant criticism. The idea of nation has not escaped this criticism, which is linked to a paradigm shift that treats groups as symbolic processes that emerge and dissolve in specific contexts (Handler 1994, 29–30). 11 Margaret Canovan suggests defining nations as “political communities that are experienced as if they were communities of kin, but the ‘as if’ is vital” (1996, 59). 12 The fact that many writers still use “nation” to refer to the state is quite revealing about majority nationalism. 13 Tilly emphasizes the importance of conquest and colonization in the national histories of France and England: “In France, the external military conquests of 1815, 1870, 1940, and 1944 all shaped democratic institutions, 1815 and 1940 by pushing the country towards authoritarianism, 1870 and 1944 by (eventually) pushing the country toward democratic citizenship. In Britain, failed military conquests precipitated major alterations of national power repeatedly between 1650 and 1746, while foreign military power continued to figure in Irish transitions up to 1916. British colonization eventually established more or less democratic institutions in Australia, New Zealand, North America, and (more uncertainly) South Asia and South Africa. Within the British Isles, however, colonization dedemocratized Ireland by installing a client Protestant minority in that largely Catholic country” (Tilly 2004, 165). 14 The explicit emphasis placed on the constitution as the nation’s foundation leads many authors to talk in a misleading manner, in our opinion, of constitutional patriotism instead of nationalism. 15 The dissemination of these symbols and narratives is largely achieved through the education system, as we have mentioned. The use of myths, heroes, and traditions within the framework of the project of national identity building (be it by minorities or by a majority) draws on interpretation and “invention.” This does not mean that some pre-existing traits were not already present and thus could be used to build a national identity. Memory and identity are subjective and selective; the way they are articulated together depends upon power relationships. For example, Gillis notes, that before the nineteenth century, (1) there was no genuine institutionalization of memory among the popular classes (whose past is so much a part of the present that they do not feel the need to protect it) and that (2) popular memories were but very limited for a long time. This situation changed with the development of national identities, for example in sixteenth-century
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Contemporary Majority Nationalism
England; nonetheless, it was only at the end of the eighteenth century that this phenomenon swept the “popular” classes. “National memory” is peculiar when compared to pre-national popular memories, among other things because “national history is shared by people who have never seen or heard of one another, yet who regard themselves as having a common history.” (Gillis 1994, 7). National memories became more impersonal at the same time that they become more democratic (11; see also Tilly 2004). 16 “Banal” nationalism is therefore not solely the product of majority nationalism. Minority nationalisms, particularly if spearheaded by autonomous political institutions, can also produce this type of nationalism (Crameri 2000). However, the expression of its minority versions are more often noticed and studied by analysts. 17 For example, McEwen (2002) has shown how the British welfare state has generated feelings of belonging in Scotland, while Brodie (2002) has shed light on the relative integrative dimensions of Canadian social policies.
Part One Theoretical Considerations
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2 The Paradoxes of Contemporary Nationalism Alain Dieckhoff Uzbekistan, Eritrea, Moldavia, Slovakia, and East Timor are all new independent states on our world map, but they are by no means the only ones. In the 1990s, no less than twenty new states were created. Most of them emerged out of the ruins of the Soviet Empire, while others were the product of the resumption of a decolonization process interrupted by expansionist neighbours such as Ethiopia and Indonesia. This list, however, takes into account only the criteria of international recognition, which provide a partial and imperfect image of much broader nationalist claims.1 Here, the Basque iehendakari (head of government) has presented a plan of free association between the Basque Country and Spain that aims to further transfer responsibilities to the Autonomous Community and gain Basque representation in the European Union. There a Flemish minister-president has demanded confederalism, which many perceive as the last stage in the dismemberment of Belgium. There are also the leaders of the Kosovar government who adopted a unilateral declaration of independence (February 2008) that was recognized by more than seventy countries over the world. Outside Europe, Québécois sovereignists have not given up on their aspirations for independence, despite the defeat suffered in the second referendum of 1995. The Kurds of Iraq have seen their de facto internal autonomy constitutionally guaranteed by the constitution adopted by referendum on 15 October 2005, which establishes federalism. Some Sikhs continue to fight in India for the creation of a sovereign state, Khalistan (land of the pure), whilst Tamil Tigers attempted during more than twenty-five years (until their military defeat in May 2009) to gain the independence of
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Theoretical Considerations
Eelam, sometimes through suicide attacks in the north and eastern part of Sri Lanka. This undeniable nationalist effervescence is for many a regressive and anachronistic phenomenon. It seems regressive because, by celebrating particular identities (cultural, regional …), nationalism renders problematic political citizenship as the supreme allegiance transcending particularisms. It appears anachronistic because these nationalisms seem to run counter to the process of globalization, which has commonly been understood as involving the emergence of a single, authentic human condition and the marginalization of difference. This perception is, surprisingly enough, embraced by Marxists, liberals and post-nationalist republicans alike.
The End of Nationalism: A Shared illusion Although Marxists deplore the social costs of economic globalization, they think, following Karl Marx (1975), that “national boundaries and antagonisms between peoples fade away with the development of a bourgeoisie, free commerce, the world market, the standardization of industrial production and the conditions they involve” (Marx 1975, coll. 10/18, 42; editors’ translation). Liberals, permeated with a functionalist perspective, view the emergence of a global economic market as a means to foster interdependence and interactions and, consequently, to create around shared interests a true international community that supersedes national cleavages. Finally, post-nationalist republicans adhere to Jurgen Habermas’s (2001) notion that “globalization taxes the cohesive strength of national communities … This commodified, homogenous culture doesn’t just impose itself on distant lands, of course; in the West too, it levels out even the strongest local traditions” (Habermas 2001, 74). These three schools of thought meet up because they share a similar evolutionary perspective that sees in the multiplication of interactions the most direct route towards global unification. They do, however, differ about the finality of this process: Marxists adhere to the notion that capitalism will fall victim to an ultimate crisis; liberals claim that market democracy will end up being adopted by all; and post-nationalist republicans consider that the problems confronting humanity are such that they can find answers only at the supranational level. Nevertheless, on the phenomenon of globalization as a force promoting uniformity and reducing differences, especially national ones, the
Paradoxes of Contemporary Nationalism
23
similarity between the three schools of thought is astounding. How, then, can the resilience of nationalist movements be explained? How can the proliferation of states, seen as a major strategic challenge, be understood? (See Boniface 2000.) To these questions, Marxists, liberals, and post-nationalist republicans provide identical answers. Since they cannot deny the existence of nationalism, they diminish its importance by treating it as a transitional occurrence, one that the course of history will undoubtedly eradicate. For Eric Hobsbawm (1990, 191), “in spite of its evident prominence, nationalism is historically less important. It is no longer, as it were, a global political programme, as it may be said to have been in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is at most a complicating factor, or a catalyst for other development” (Hobsbawn 1990, 191). Where does the qualitative difference between these nationalisms lie? Nineteenth-century nationalism in Europe, as well as the decolonization nationalisms, were, the argument goes, fundamentally emancipating projects, while contemporary nationalism “rarely even pretends to be more than a cry of anguish or fury … reactions of weakness and fear, attempts to erect barricades to keep at bay the forces of the modern world” (Hobsbawm 1990, 170). This argument is not convincing: it is true that as a general rule nationalism is reactive, as can be seen from the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the Napoleonic invasions fostered German and Spanish nationalisms. However, nationalism has always been a differentiated phenomenon: the emancipating dimension has coexisted with a regressive aspect (including strong xenophobic exclusionary tendencies). Surprisingly, skepticism concerning contemporary nationalism is also found in the thinking of such liberals as Francis Fukuyama. Even though Fukuyama (1992, 215) considers that “the desire for national independence and sovereignty can be seen as one possible manifestation of the desire for self-determination and freedom” and even though he views strong national cohesion as necessary for a stable democracy, nationalism nevertheless remains in fine a negative force founded on a megalothymic zeal (that is, a desire to be recognized as superior to others). In contrast, liberal democracy rests on the promotion of reason and on an isothymic principle (the desire of being recognized as equal to others). The planet is thus viewed as being divided between a world engaged within history, a world corresponding basically to the Third World, where conflicts
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Theoretical Considerations
are fed by ideologies, religions, and nationalisms, and a posthistoric world (the West and a large part of Latin America), where interactions are primarily economic and where politics is regulated by procedural democracy. In the long term, however, Fukuyama (1992, 271) is convinced that the unification of the world will occur under the auspices of market democracy and that “nationalism is to fade away as a political force”: all aspects of modernization (economic development, urbanization, progress in education) are seen as leading to the decline of traditional forms of authority (tribes, churches …) and national identities. Jürgen Habermas stresses that historically the democratic community developed within a national context: the nation-state, which unites demos and ethnos, republican citizenship, and community defined by language and shared history.2 This novel fusion means that “world society today is composed politically of nation-states. The historical type of state [that emerged from the French and the American Revolutions] has achieved global dominance … thus today the nation-state has definitely superseded older political formations” (1998a, 105–6). Nevertheless, for Habermas (106–7) the link between the republican spirit and national conscience is purely contingent. Not only is citizenship distinct from national identity, but from a functional standpoint the nation-state is simply no longer equipped to address economic, technological, ecological, and military challenges. The consequence is unavoidable insofar as “the progressive undermining of national sovereignty will necessitate the founding and expansion of political institutions on the supranational level, a process whose beginning can already be observed.” The transcendence of the nation-state will thus occur through supranational organizations, the European Union being the most accomplished model. By a process of abstraction, the EU achieves a disconnection between nation and political society, thus opening the way for the establishment of post-national democracy. The disappearance of nationalism is certainly not validated at this point, but this does not preclude a shared certainty that it is programmed by “the course of History.” For Fukuyama (1992, 275), “the fact that the final political neutralization of nationalism may not occur in this generation or the next does not affect the prospect of its ultimately taking place.” As for Eric Hobsbawm (1990, 177–8), he sees a hidden dialectic in action: the nationalist ebullition of the end of the twentieth century is the swansong of nationalism, rather
Paradoxes of Contemporary Nationalism
25
than its zenith. Jürgen Habermas (1998a, 106) takes up a similar position. Adopting a Hegelian perspective, he considers that “every historical formation is condemned to decline once it has reached maturity”; as such, “the triumphal procession of the nation-state also has an ironical, obverse side” insofar as this universalization of the state occurs at the moment when historical conditions negate its practical purpose. Since it is unverifiable, this “demonstration” seems more like a sleight of hand than rigorous sociological reasoning. The arguments of Marxists, liberals and post-nationalist republicans are used to deny the pertinence of nationalism, since accepting it would invalidate the postulate of the advent of universalism, whose decisive stage is globalization as it has been unfolding in the last twenty years or so. Obviously, a more complex approach has to be favoured. Instead of doing away with nationalism as a disturbing socio-political phenomenon or seeking a hidden logic within it, it is more useful to examine it in terms of what it really is: a central configuration of modernity that will certainly be transformed by globalization but that will not disappear as a result. Marxists, liberals and post-nationalist republicans are inclined to go against this line of argument, since their thinking rests on the presupposition that the multiplication of economic exchanges, global communication networks, and the development of a standardized mass culture leads to the dilution of national specificities, to closer ties between individuals and peoples, and to the creation of solidarities at an ever higher level. For Fukuyama (1992a, xiv–xv), there is no doubt that “all countries undergoing economic modernization must increasingly resemble one another … Such societies have become increasingly linked with one another through global markets and the spread of a universal consumer culture.” In the end, national boundaries will be erased and humanity will be one. This perspective merely serves to actualize and build on the theory of national construction put forth by the political scientist Karl Deutsch in the 1950s. For Deutsch (1966), modernization, that is, urbanization, industrialization, mass education, and the development of communication, gives rise to an intensification of interactions. Such increased social mobilization is seen as building a national cohesion that progressively destroys old allegiances, local and regional. From national integration, we have moved, thanks to an explosion in communication, to a world integration that will have a corrosive effect
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Theoretical Considerations
on nations. How much credit should one give to this hypothesis? A limited one, since it rests on a unidimensional interpretation that has often been questioned by historical facts.
The Dialectics of Modernization If modernization has been able to accelerate national assimilation within a state by marginalizing or erasing cultural or social differences between populations of different backgrounds, this process has never been straightforward. In France, things did work that way. The growth of social mobility at the beginning of industrialization accelerated migratory movements within the country, pushing people to leave their native provinces and forsake traditional professions in favour of capitals and regions experiencing industrial growth. Associated with the voluntarism of the republican state, which, through schooling, sought to develop a genuine linguistic nationalism, these internal migrations did lead to the transformation of the Bretons, Alsatians, and other provincial groups into French people. However, the outcome of modernization was vastly different when it occurred only within a specific region. While the intra-regional migrations did speed up the relinquishing of local micro-identities, they also led to a strengthening of regional identity at the expense of state national identity. For example, in Catalonia during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the rise of industrialization pushed peasants, from the Pyrenean border in the north to Valencia in the south, to head towards Barcelona, where they experienced for the first time, through a common language, the feeling, albeit diffuse, of forming a specific community. The village identity was supplanted little by little by a Catalan identity, which new Catalanist political organizations promoted vigorously. In this context, the migration, starting in the 1920s, of different populations coming from other regions in Spain, far from weakening Catalan consciousness, served only to stimulate it. Although modest in the beginning, this flux took on enormous proportions during the Franco period, with the arrival of a million and a half people between 1951 and 1975 (particularly from Andalusia) in a region that had had only 3.5 million inhabitants in the early 1950s. This massive influx reinforced a sense of urgency within Catalan organizations concerning the defense of the Catalan identity.
Paradoxes of Contemporary Nationalism
27
The result was also different when peasants speaking a colloquial language were forced to leave their region for urban centers featuring a different and politically dominant linguistic group. In Central Europe, the industrialization of Bohemia-Moravia, like that of Hungary, was the product of a German bourgeoisie, often of Jewish origin, while the working class was made up of rural Czechs, Slovaks, or Hungarians (Michel 1995, 133–54). In a case like this, when linguistic and social cleavages overlap, the language of the politically dominant group acts as a barrier to communication that prevents, or at least handicaps, the social promotion of members of the other language group. The latter are thus tempted to create a “protective niche” where social mobility is assured, thereby forging ahead on the road of cultural and, later, political nationalism (see Gellner on the “Ruritanian metaphor,” 1983, 90–6). Obviously, the paths of modernization have been tortuous, and it is far from necessarily true that the multiplication of interactions has produced a “happy assimilation.” In many cases, the growth of exchanges has, on the contrary, had exactly the opposite effect: it has accelerated the development of national consciousness and highlighted distinguishing features between a group and its neighbours, as well as features shared by members of the same group. More than thirty years ago, a counter theory to the then popular nationalconstruction paradigm that predicted integration and the dilution of national identities was posited by Walker Connor (1972, 329), who highlighted the catalytic effect of modernization on nationalism. For him, “advances in communications and transportation tend also to increase the cultural awareness of the minorities by making their members more aware of the distinctions between themselves and others.” Of course, the idea is not to construct some new iron law suggesting that the acceleration of social mobility and the intensification of communication will necessarily lead to an exponential growth of conflicting nationalisms. Bavarians or Saxons will not espouse separatism for the purpose of recreating past kingdoms and principalities simply because they share a standardized German identity. The move to bring people together will be perceived as a threat and accompanied by nationalist mobilization only if the political contract that binds the different parties is viewed as lopsided, unsatisfactory for one of them. The socio-political context is, once again, crucial.
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The Unavoidable Issue of Identity Consider the case of Québec, where, in comparison to English Canada, modernization started later on. The process was not as abrupt and delayed as many have argued, making the 1960s a critical juncture where Québec witnessed a transition from a rural to an urban and industrial society. Nevertheless, even if modernization was more gradual and in fact reached back to the first half of the century, the Quiet Revolution certainly represented a period of intense transformation that erased the disparities between anglophones and francophones. All indicators show a remarkable convergence between the two communities. Francophones, who constituted large segments of the working class in the early twentieth century, experienced a remarkable social ascent in terms of both income and professional occupations. Today, levels of urbanization and consumption practices are almost identical. The same is true for behaviours: Québec is similar to the rest of Canada, with a decrease in religious practice and birth rates and an increase in divorce rates. Attitudes towards civil liberties and ethics are also similar.3 However, it was at the precise moment when francophones were becoming similar to anglophones that francophones created the Parti Québécois, which came to power in 1976 and twice sought to make Québec a sovereign state. In 1970, 34 percent of francophones saw themselves as Canadians and 21 percent as Québécois; twenty years later, the figures were 9 percent and 59 percent, respectively. The fact that francophone Québécois live in the same culture of consumerism, secularism, liberalism, and urban democracy as English-Canadians and that they pursue similar ideals of individual freedom and democratic equality (Kymlicka 2001, 256) does not prevent a large majority of them from wishing to be recognized as members of a “distinct society.” To think that a growing similarity in attitudes and values nullifies tendencies towards differentiation rests on a confusion between social proximity and identity convergence. Increased similarities can occur without generating a common national identity. Meanwhile, identity convergence occurs only if members of group a have the subjective conviction of belonging to the same community as their fellow citizens from group b: if this process of identification does not exist, the members of these two groups can share the same values without sharing the same identity.4
Paradoxes of Contemporary Nationalism
29
Minority nationalism emerges not in a vacuum but through its interaction with the central state, which is itself a supplier of nationalism. In a liberal political context, this is masked in two ways. First, allegiance to the state is frequently held to be a legitimate expression of national sentiment and patriotism, whereas, inversely, challenges to the state are invariably disqualified as the manifestation of a regressive force, nationalism. With this rhetorical sleight of hand, the actual convergence between the two forms of nationalism is avoided. The state is then presented as organizing a strictly egalitarian relationship among all citizens. This “universalizing” concept is abstract and well adapted to the national needs of the majority and to the expectations of dispersed groups such as religious, linguistic, and immigrant minorities. It is less satisfying for territorialized groups that consider themselves separate nations and that see in the “nationalism of citizenship” an instrument for diluting their particular identities. The nationalism of the majority, although concealed by a universalist gloss that may be unconscious, is no less real. In Canada, as Weber describes it, English-speaking Canadians do not have the same reason for preferring the federal side, or at least they do not express it the same way. They do not think of Ottawa as the vehicle for a distinctively English-Canadian culture. Their allegiance is (they would say) to Canada as a whole, not to a specific linguistic community. To a certain extent, this may be misleading, hiding the true importance of language to their allegiance. After all, English Canadian political debate expanded beyond provincial boundaries precisely because citizens in many provinces spoke the same language, and when those debates did expand, the English-language discussion remained (indeed remains today) largely autonomous from the French, especially at the popular level. One suspects that English-speaking Canadians have frequently identified, as distinctively Canadian, phenomena that are really confined to their linguistic groups. (1994, 210) English Canadians do not recognize their national purpose because they “have not had the same need to distinguish between allegiance to a linguistic community and allegiance to the truly pan-Canadian community. They could afford to run the two together because, as
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Theoretical Considerations
they were the majority, the distinctive character of their linguistic community was never threatened” (210). This statement is of utmost importance. Anglophones embrace with fervor the project of a Canadian identity, not because they adhere more markedly than francophones to the liberal values inherent in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms but because this conception of a blanket nationalism is coherent with their own interests. As long as the political framework of reference is the Canadian state, anglophones, who constitute an absolute majority, are assured of maintaining political power through national institutions (Parliament, the Supreme Court). Moreover, from the moment the individualist logic prevails, it nullifies any generic protection measure for a particular cultural identity, such as Québec’s. However, the rationale that pushes a majority group to support state nationalism is rarely disclosed. In general, its members camouflage it by presenting themselves as generous supporters of national unity, driven by sincere idealism and challenged by dangerous, narrow-minded separatists. The Canadian example is not unique. Before the division of Czechoslovakia in 1993, one could find on the Czech side a similar incomprehension with regard to Slovak nationalism, which was held to be backward, and an identification with the federation as a whole, simply because for Czech elites, Czech interests and the interests of the federation overlapped.5 This overlapping allows one to understand the difficulty the Czechs had with assuming their independence after the separation with Slovakia. They had to explicitly define a national identity that had until then primarily expressed itself through the central state. Undoubtedly, English Canada would have to address similar difficulties in case of Québec’s secession. In the minority group, the consciousness of a particular identity is nurtured by the existence of a “societal culture,” that is, “a culture which provides its members with meaningful ways of life across the full range of human activities, including social, educational, religious, recreational, and economic life, encompassing both public and private spheres” (Kymlicka 1995, 76). This encompassing culture needs numerous and well-structured channels (schools, media, institutions, and associations) to reproduce itself and to grow. In this light, Québec certainly harbours a whole societal culture, different from the rest of Canada, which is present in the school and university systems, the media, the administration, and the business realm. A societal culture often involves a specific language, but this is not
Paradoxes of Contemporary Nationalism
31
necessary. Scotland has its own societal culture, although neither Scots nor Gaelic are in use. The persistence of three institutions (the Presbyterian Church, an independent education system, the written law) within a territory whose border was set by the 1237 Treaty of York is enough to give Scottish culture a strong density. If a societal culture is not present, that is, if a culture is diffuse and residual, it is doubtful that it can provide the impetus for national identity. A case in point is Brittany, which has lost most of its societal culture. Despite efforts carried out by various cultural entrepreneurs for its revival, their project seems improbable: Brittany’s incorporation within the French space has been so great that it is now below the threshold for maintaining a strong enough cultural coherence. A more extreme case occurs where a societal culture never existed and where creating one ex nihilo is just impossible. Here, the Northern League, founded by Umberto Bossi in 1987, is the archetypal example. This political movement was able in the 1990s to attract the most dynamic entrepreneurial forces of Northeastern Italy, seduced by its fiscal-oriented discourse directed at the inefficiencies of a predatory state. The League was good at rhetoric, but it was unable to present a coherent nationalist project. Although there was a declaration of the independence of Padania (a term coined to refer to an area of Northern Italy along the Po River, from Piemont to Frioul) in Venice on September 1996, that goal is in fact unlikely to be achieved. For many League voters, independence is merely a tactical strategy for promoting the federalization of the state, a reform finally approved by the Parliament in November 2005. Moreover, Padania’s cause is hardly able to mobilize large crowds,6 and for a crucial reason: the construction of national symbols (a green and white flag, an anthem, and a transitional constitution) has not been sufficient to mask the tremendous void within the secessionist project, which suffers from a colossal “identity deficit.” Indeed, the Padania promoted by Bossi is no more homogenous than Italy as a whole. Until the Risorgimento, the north of the peninsula had been divided for centuries into competing kingdoms, republics, and duchies, under the heavy influence of neighbouring states such as France, Spain, and Austria. There was no pre-existing political unity or memories of a shared history. The Padanian language is also an illusion: the standard Italian used in Milan is not significantly different from that of Rome, and the difference between the Piemontais and Venitian dialects is not
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Theoretical Considerations
any less than that between Sicilian and Napolitan. As for religion, Catholicism reigns in both North and South, although the League has artificially opposed a “Calvinist Catholicism” to the “Baroque Catholicism” of the Mezzogiorno. Even economic cohesion is limited: the Northeast of small businesses stands in contrast to the Northwest of the great industrial complexes. Without a doubt, in its efforts to instill a “Padanian” national consciousness, the League has behaved in classic fashion: all nationalisms have invented traditions and re-created the past. However, in contrast to Flemish and Catalan nationalisms, which were able to position themselves within a long historical trajectory and a relatively coherent territory and which could use identity-related resources (first and foremost language), Padanism has a genuine problem in giving coherent substance to its project of independence for a Northern Italy as diverse as the peninsula as a whole. To compensate for this deficit, the League switched strategy. Finding itself unable to positively define Padanians, it contrasted them with other categories: Southerners and, increasingly, immigrants from non-European countries, particularly Muslims (Machiavelli 2001, 129–42). From this strategy stems the development of a violent xenophobic discourse denouncing the “invasion by immigrants and the islamisation of Padania.” In many ways, this aggressive discourse is aimed at masking to emptiness of the League’s project.7 Without a societal culture, the crystallization of an “alternative” national identity that can be mobilized by a separatist nationalist movement operating within a state seems close to impossible. In other words, a nationalism seeking separation cannot flourish without a cultural basis. Granted, cultures do not form organic entities with impenetrable boundaries. Nevertheless, although cultures are constantly reworked, reshaped, and recomposed by incessant processes of borrowing, they nevertheless possess a particular configuration that distinguishes one from the others. Thus, there is a difference in structure between groups claiming to be nations and those claiming to be ethnic groups. The former require the existence of a societal culture pervading the entire social body (Québécois, Flemings, Catalans ...); the latter are generally devoid of one, although this does not prevent them from mobilizing, as in the case of ethno-religious and immigrant communities. Many observers of contemporary immigrant groups have concluded that ethnicity persists even if it increasingly lacks cultural content. Tariq Modood
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(1998, 385) points out that in Great Britain “ethnic identification is no longer necessarily connected to personal participation in distinctive cultural practices, such as those of language, religion, or dress. Some people have expressed an ethnic identification even though they have not participated in distinctive cultural practices. Hence, it is fair to say that a new conception of ethnic identity has emerged.” In the same fashion, in the United States “identity does not have to have a distinctive cultural content at all. It may be defined purely in terms of descent” (Barry 2001, 82). Cultural difference may then diminish while ethnic diversity persists, even grows. This assertion was put forth by Fredrik Barth (1969, 33), a Norwegian anthropologist, in his pioneering work, where he noted that “the important thing to recognize is that a drastic reduction of cultural differences between ethnic groups does not correlate in any simple way with a reduction in the organizational relevance of ethnic identities, or a breakdown in boundary-maintaining process.” Although this fact may appear surprising at first, it highlights the fact that ethnicity is above all linked to the establishment of symbolic boundaries distinguishing insiders from outsiders. This demarcation does not need to be founded on strong cultural differentiations, since ethnicity functions mostly as a principle of social differentiation. For ethnicity to persist, it needs merely to be mobilized on the basis of strategic choices made by political actors. As much as ethnicity does not require a pointed cultural content, national identity cannot completely do without it. Of course, the importance of the organization of the world into states is such that states rarely disappear voluntarily. (The suppression of states by force is obviously more frequent, as in the case of the Baltic states absorbed by the Soviet Union in 1940 or Kuwait invaded by Iraq in 1990). The existence of institutions tends to give birth to a bureaucracy, whose interest it is to have the state survive even if it has strong cultural affinities with a neighbouring state. Also, one cannot underestimate the fact that even if at its creation state X may possess a weak legitimacy, it often manages to become more legitimate as schools, the army, the media, and so on, all play a role in fostering a shared national sentiment. These factors explain why the many unions in the Arab world have never led to the definitive disappearance of a state (the most serious such endeavor was the fusion of Egypt and Syria to form the United Arab Republic, which lasted only three years, 1958–61). Cultural proximity, thus, is not sufficient
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to produce a political association unless it can be founded on a long history: divided nations follow the path of reunification. This was the case for Vietnam in 1976 and Germany and Yemen in the 1990s, and this will be the case for Korea in the future. These nations were separated into two states by colonialism or the Cold War, although they had previously shared a collective destiny. Once the dividing political contexts disappeared, there was no reason to keep two different states, and these nations managed to resume their common history.
A Little Detour through History As noted previously, developmentalist theorists in the fifties and sixties held that modernization was a teleological process, which, by superseding tradition, would lead to an increasingly rationalist and individualist society and to a decline in strong collective identities. Modernization, however, is a much more complex process. At the tail end of the nineteenth century, one of the pioneers of modern architecture, Austrian Adolf Loos, was struck by the uniformity of clothing in the United States. Unlike the citizens of Austria-Hungary, where peasants wore traditional costumes that were distinct from one valley to another, Americans in the cities were clothed in a standard suit that featured only small differences. A century later, his wish to see a similar approach to clothing in modern societies – a reflection of an egalitarian ethos, in his eyes – seems to have been fulfilled, although through jeans, rather than suits. However, this progressive rapprochement of lifestyles has not prevented the concomitant affirmation of powerful symbolic differences, whether nationalist or ethnic. The current phenomenon of globalization, even if it has accelerated over the last twenty years, is embedded in previous stages of modernization and will have the same type of contrasted effects: an increasing convergence of lifestyles, conceptions, representations … but, at the same time, a reactivation of processes of identity demarcation. The progressive globalization of the world is accompanied by its “nationalization,” the greatest evidence of which is the prodigious multiplication of the number of states in the world: close to two hundred today. Globalization and fragmentation are closely connected, as the past centuries highlight. History shows us that eras in which exchanges increased were always those in which nationalist
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claims gained incontestable momentum. The invention of the printing press, which led to an unparalleled diffusion of knowledge, the development of maritime trade, and the great discoveries gave birth to a more open perspective of the world. However, simultaneously, in Europe national communities asserted themselves and differentiated themselves on both a religious and a linguistic basis (which often overlapped). Spain finished its “Reconquista” and through it completed a precocious political and cultural nationalization. France and Great Britain were consolidated in their national specificity by the Hundred Years War. Elsewhere, with nascent Protestantism, the promotion of the people’s language (Luther translated the Bible into German) and the creation of state churches favoured the growth of national sentiments. This effervescence led to the establishment of the first state system formalized by the Treaty of Westphalia (1648). Two centuries later, in the nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution featured the prodigious development of communication and the accelerated circulation of goods and capital. This shrinking of the world went hand in hand with the creation of new states carved out of the Ottoman Empire (Serbia, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria) and, after the First World War, on the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and, to a lesser degree, the Russian Empire (the Baltic states and Finland). The progressive development of a mass society and of new techniques in the interwar period contributed to a “planetarization” of problems (including war) but was also accompanied by “a counter shock”: the political rising of dozens of colonized countries that would transform the community of nations, until then essentially European, into a truly international community. Today, economic globalization, the increasing uniformity of cultural production based on the American model, the growth of the market economy, the diffusion of the democratic model, and the further development of communications may very well lead to a fourth stage in the quest for identity that would once again be heard through nationalist claims. The naive vision that sees the multiplication of social and economic exchanges and the growth of communication and travel as leading to the demise of differences receives a clear denial from history. The American historian Carlton Hayes (1931) had already denounced, in his time, the fallacious optimism of those who thought that industrialization would mean the end of nationalism. While the Industrial Revolution was accompanied by “a rapid growth of a kind of economic internationalism, a huge expansion of
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trade in goods, persons, and ideas across national political frontiers,” it also went hand in hand with a “diffusion and intensification of nationalism, so that the more trade [had] expanded between nations, the more within each nation various sorts of nationalism [had] been intensified” (234–6). An opening onto the world is thus accompanied by a growing retreat into one’s world, and the acceleration of globalization will therefore maintain the phenomenon of particularism as it provides it with new means to manifest itself.
Globalization’s Economic Advantages for Separatist and Autonomist Nationalisms To clarify the relationship between globalization and fragmentation, the advent of new states in the nineties had little to do, at least directly, with economic globalization and its social and cultural consequences. Rather, it was countries that had been marginalized in the global capitalist economy, those that had known “real socialism,” that experienced nationalist implosion. The disintegration of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia was first and foremost the product of the unraveling of authoritarian federal systems or, in the case of the USSR, of an ideological empire. As for Eritrea, its independence in 1993 was the product of an armed political resistance that had struggled against forceful incorporation by Ethiopia. Even if there was no direct causal link between globalization and those nationalist surges, interactions between the two did indeed exist. While the dismembering of the USSR and the two other federations can be explained primarily by political factors, the persistence and strengthening of nationalist claims in developed countries (Belgium, Spain, Italy …) are nurtured by the dynamic of globalization. Of course, globalization is not the direct cause of the rise of Flemish or Catalan nationalism, which had emerged already in the nineteenth century. These nationalisms were the product of a specific socio-historical context, particularly of a certain type of relationship with the state. Nevertheless, globalization gave them a new impulse because it offered new resources. As an astute economist noticed, “this idea that a large internal market is better than a small one is disappearing as the global market offers the largest possible market … economic integration contracts political communities” (Cohen 1997, 97; editors’ translation). Increasingly aggressive international
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competition increases the feeling that it is optimal to operate within more compact territorial units. While no national economy ever was a unified and closed market, as had been expected by the German economist Friedrich List in the nineteenth century, the nation-state was able to regulate with a certain degree of success economic development within the national framework. Today, the acceleration of globalization has cut down the regulative and redistributive capacity of the state but provides, by contrast, incontestable assets to regional entities. Investments and business strategies now respond more to regional than to national undertakings. The investment strategies of economic actors target nation-states less than region-states, that is, economic zones with fuzzy boundaries that can be completely subsumed within a single state (Kansai around Osaka in Japan or Baden-Wurtemberg in Germany) or that straddle several state boundaries such as the “triangle of growth” consisting of Singapore/Johore and Malaysia/Batam (Indonesia) (Ohmae 1996). These regions are chosen on the basis of different criteria, such as geography, existing infrastructure, professional qualifications, and salaries. They have a population of at least five million but never over twenty million. Such regions are perceived by many investors as operational units in the global economy because their relatively modest size gives them a nice compactness, while at the same time forcing them to keep adapting to changes in international competition. With a small internal market, these regions do not have any other choice than to function with an open economy fully integrated into global exchanges.8 In order to attract foreign capital, economic and political elites of these region-states find it in their interest to optimize their regional attributes and distance themselves from the political centre. Thanks to their inclusion in the global economy, these region-states can secure direct access to resources, which allows them to forgo, at least partially, national markets, all while consolidating an autonomous economic base. This situation does not have direct political implications for a number of region-states (Sao Paulo, Tokyo …), but it does give others additional means in their strategy of national affirmation. This is the case for regions with a strong “identity differential” with the rest of the country, for example Catalonia and Flanders. In Flanders, in order to attract foreign businesses, the government promotes assets like a modern infrastructure, qualified labour, and a strong work ethic. These arguments have proven persuasive for many international businesses (Mazda, Volvo,
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Philip Morris, Pioneer …), that have preferred to settle in the North of Belgium, rather than in Wallonia. In the same vein, the successful economic integration of a region into the world economy helps with a strategy of political disconnection. For instance, in Quebec exports to other Canadian provinces have gone down from 55 percent of total exports in 1983 to 33 percent in 2000, whereas international trade has steadily grown. This trend has been helped by NAFTA, which has made the United States Québec’s first trading partner (83 percent of exports with international partners go to that country). This declining dependence on Canadian markets is an asset for Québécois nationalists insofar as it reduces the costs of an eventual secession (Holitscher and Suter 1999). Although the existence of a dynamic economy integrated into the global world represents a solid asset for separatist or autonomist nationalism, it is not on its own sufficient to maintain political mobilization over the long run, as is shown by the case of the Northern League in Italy. Umberto Bossi’s movement was able at the end of the 1980s to become a political force in the North of the country (especially the Northeast) thanks to the support of small-business owners, who constituted the most innovative economic sector and sought, through a protest vote, to denounce a redundant, inefficient, and parasitic state. References to economic modernity thus fed nationalist protest, but they were clearly insufficient for structuring a lasting nationalist movement. Rather, the Northern League seemed to be blatantly founded solely on economic utilitarianism, which has proven to be too weak for generating a feeling of shared identity, which is indispensable to the success of nationalism.
Long-Distance Nationalism as the Nationalism of Globalization The growth of migratory movements and their effect on nationalism is one of the major phenomena linked to globalization. These migrations are supposed to have all kinds of consequences. They are thought to lead to a novel reframing of identities, as migrants partially detach themselves from their countries of origin without melting into the national community of their country of residence through a process of acculturation. Mixed and hybrid identities develop, welding the old to the new and the “foundational” to the “acquired.” For the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, migrations
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encourage the emergence of new ethnoscapes inhabited by diaspora communities of a different type, insofar as they barely maintain contact with their country of origin and lack feelings of territoriality. Sikhs, Tamils, Haitians, Armenians, and other such migrants are said to truly form “transnational nations” that evolve in a global deterritorialized space. This new context is thought to lead to the invention of post-national forms of political participation. Given the fact that many rights (especially social, economic, and civil rights) are now granted to immigrants on the basis of their residence, rather than naturalization, Yasemin Soysal holds that they involve a new type of political belonging based on universal human rights that transcends the particularism of national citizenship. The implementation of this new political regulation involves the mobilization of international norms (such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) or the use of international organizations (such as the Council of Europe and the European Court of Human Rights) (Soysal 1994). However, any conclusions about a “post-nationalization” of the world through migrations need to be heavily nuanced. Undoubtedly, as with all human groups migrants and members of diasporas do not constitute organic entities with impermeable borders: they are thus unavoidably transformed by their remoteness from their country of origin and their insertion into another society. Exchanges and borrowings permanently reshape the boundaries of groups and their internal structure. However, very rarely do these processes lead to an authentic hybridization, that is, to the emergence of a fundamentally new identity founded on a specific mixing between the “original” and the “secondary” identity. Rather, they lead to a reconfiguration of belonging in which the ethno-national reference plays an important role. It is necessary to shun the romantic illusion linking geographic dispersion and the atomization of identity: the sentiment of collective belonging can be just as strong in diasporas as in territorialized communities. In fact, it is often more vigorous in diasporas simply because a diasporic group needs to have a clear vision of its specificity to prevent it from being completely absorbed by the host society. This need is not as important in territorialized communities, since territory plays a direct and central role in anchoring people’s identity. The national referent can take two forms. Sometimes the sense of belonging rests on nationality, that is, on legal membership in a state: this is often the case for African immigrants who build their social networks and craft their territories (de Latour 2003). At
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other times, the sense of belonging is ethno-cultural: this is the case with mobilized diasporas such as those of the Tamils, Kurds, Armenians, and Jews. In this last case, one witnesses what Benedict Anderson (1998, 59) refers to as “long distance nationalism.” While some commentators falsely see migratory movements as leading to the development of transnational communities, Anderson detects instead a revival of nationalism through the workings of diasporas. This phenomenon is far from being new. Already in the nineteenth century, exile nourished nationalism, as demonstrated by the Greek example. Established in the Ottoman urban centers as well as in the cities of Central and Eastern Europe – for example in Russia – Greek elites played a crucial role in the crystallization of Hellenic nationalism (Couroucli 2002, 45–7). The same argument holds for Irish, Polish, and Jewish/Zionist nationalism (Dieckhoff 2003). Today, Sikhs in Canada and Great Britain, Tamils established in Europe and America, and Kosovars in Switzerland follow the same trend by financially and politically supporting separatist movements in their home country. The only difference in comparison to the past is the extreme radicalism of many long-distance nationalisms: fearing neither “prison, torture or death for themselves or their loved ones” (Anderson 1998, 74) they allow themselves to take uncompromising positions and to support extremist groups resorting to terrorist methods. Three factors explain the persistence of this long-distance nationalism. The first is based on the relationship with the Other. Many authors have highlighted that nationalism stems from a reaction of the periphery to the domination exercised by an Other linked to the “political centre” (colonies facing the West, but also rebellious regions against a state perceived as “foreign” such as in the Basque Country, Flanders, and so on).9 This kind of nationalism, a product of the stigmatization by the Other and the desire to imitate the Other, historically spread in the periphery as the Other of the metropolis/ centre settled among the indigenous population. This trend was reversed in the second half of the twentieth century with the massive arrival of migrants from post-colonial societies to the former metropolis. It is significant to note that this reversal did not destroy the nationalist temptation in migrant communities (at least not in some of them), for the simple reason that migration increases interactions with “Others” and the willingness to differentiate oneself from them.
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This persistence of an ambivalent relationship to the Other is accompanied by a change in the relationship with the Self. In the past, immigrants integrated themselves into the dominant culture much more rapidly and deeply. Poles, Italians, and Russian Jews that arrived in France at the beginning of the twentieth century inserted themselves quite quickly within their host country because the instruments of integration of the state (schools, the army) were powerful and because links with the country of origin were sporadic. The situation is much different today: not only is the state much less “strong” and interventionist but immigrant communities enjoy much greater resources to preserve the identity of their origins. The spread of satellite transmission allows families to continue watching television as if they were still in their country of origin. The Internet, cellular phones, and electronic messaging are all technologies that facilitate continuous contact with “sedentary” co-nationals. This presence from a distance has two opposite effects : on the one hand, it feeds the identity of origins, particularly through the use of means of communication in the mother tongue; on the other hand, it handicaps the process of integration “insofar as the competence of the children of the current generation in the language of the host country is less acute than that of their parents at the same age” (Van Parijs 2004, 313). Finally the relationship to the territory of origin is better preserved today than it was before. The mundane nature of airplane trips allows members of immigrant communities and diasporas to come and go between the host and mother countries. This link is stimulated by the much wider acceptance of bi-nationality, which allows individuals to keep their nationality of origin while acquiring that of the country of residence. Even when physical contact is rare or impossible (for political opponents of a regime, for example) migrants and their descendants often maintain a vibrant memory of their home country: it is the object of a mythic investment. It is celebrated as a historic place for the birth of the people, the land of ancestors, and founding events, and it is often held sacred, since it is associated with a religious revelation. These symbolic relationships are sufficient for maintaining national identification. As Walker Connor (1986, 16) pointed out, “The ethnic homeland is far more than territory,” since it is “imbued with an emotional, almost reverential dimension.” Wherever one may look, one conclusion can be drawn: the end of nationalism is a mere illusion. Of course, globalization presents a
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challenge to the nation-state, since it lessens its regulative capacity, but this does not mean that nationalism disappears (Dieckhoff and Jaffrelot 2005). It does not disappear, first, because the process of globalization is not straightforward but dialectical and it therefore also provides new resources to nationalist actors. Second, it does not disappear because the diasporization of the world leads, not to the extinction of nationalism, but to its reinvention through various long-distance forms. In spite of the fact that its death is constantly forecasted, nationalism is similar to the phoenix of antiquity: it is always reborn from its ashes.
notes 1 On this general trend, see my (Dieckhoff 2000). 2 For a detailed analysis of Habermas’s post-national republicanism, see Savidan (2004). 3 This information is drawn from Stéphane Dion (1991). 4 On the main characteristics of national identities, see Norman (1995). 5 On this issue, see the analysis by Petr Pithart (1995). 6 For the “declaration of independence,” only thirty thousand people gathered around Bossi in Milan, while the National Alliance of Gianfranco Fini, a current member of the governing coalition, along with the League, mobilized five times as much in defense of the territorial integrity of the country. 7 This overt racism led a segment of the middle class that had previously supported the League to back off, if only out of self-interest: their businesses needed immigrant labour. The reform of the state towards more autonomy for the regions also contributed to the loss of support for the League, which gathered only 4 percent of the vote in 2001 compared to 8 percent in 1992. 8 The structural advantages of small countries in international competition (including a strong capacity for economic adjustments, and an exportoriented economy) have been analyzed by Peter Katzenstein (1985). 9 This analysis is developed by Christophe Jaffrelot (2005).
3 Imagined Nations: Personal Identity, National Identity, and the Places of Memory àngel castiñeira The Emergence of Identities Faced with the phenomenon of new identity claims, philosophers and social scientists have been obliged to revisit the question of what aspects make up personal identity and, more generally, collective identities. In part, this problem emerges, I would speculate, because the question has been poorly phrased. Thus, researchers might ask, why do we as humans claim to have an identity? Why do we also attribute identities to such groups as corporations, villages, or nations? Most studies in the philosophy of mind have arrived at the conclusion that personal identity is an interactive phenomenon that depends, at one level, on certain psychological and neurophysiologic factors and dispositions and, at another level, on social and cultural factors. Ultimately, personal identity is both an individual and a community construction, a dynamic state of consciousness that is the fruit of a long chain of transformations. We are not born an individual so much as we become one as the result of a long chain of transformations. We do not have a predetermined identity; rather, we progressively construct a feeling of identity. Personal identity is a subjective structure (but one that is relatively stable) characterized by a complex, coherent, and integrated representation of the “I.” It is an identity that the human agent must be able to develop through his interaction with others in a particular cultural context, as he gradually enters into the adult world. It is an
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identity that he will redefine throughout his life in a dynamic process composed of re-composition and rupture. Continuity, Connectivity, and Spatiotemporal Stability In order for us to be able to speak of personal identity, there must exist, first and foremost, a feeling of psychological and corporal continuity that is composed of a feeling of the duration of time, of a coherent vertical inter-temporal connection, and of successive movements of a personal journey, as well as a sense of spatiotemporal stability. Each of these things allows us to speak of the I as a situated being. This inter-temporal vertical connection, assured by memory and by intention, and added to the perception of similarity with one’s self, allows us to determine the axis of identity and the discursive process of identification or dis-identification of subjects. Identification is an evolving and largely unconscious process that occurs over a lifetime, during which the individual, through his interaction with others, forges successively, in his own original way, an ideal of the self out of the total or partial appropriation or assimilation of qualities and of attributes that derive from the diversity of models offered to him by the various different groups that make up his society. From this point of view, identity and identification constitute complementary ideas. As Luis Villoro contends, identity is constituted not out of a movement of differentiations from others but from a complex process of identification with the other and of separation from her, a dynamic process of singularization in the face of the other at the same time as she finds herself identifying with the other (Villoro 1998). Identity is a state or a disposition of the self, while identification is the process that leads us to this state. Identity is a fixed picture, the stable definition of the subject at some precise time and place, whereas identification permits us to examine the dynamic interior of the “crisis” of the subject (let us remember that the subject is full of contradictions, of vulnerabilities, and of potentials typical of its self-creating power). Identity and identification reveal a constant tension between stability and change in our lives, which happily leads us through our sense of continuity to resolution. This is what we experience when we look at an old photograph of ourselves: “The I that exists now and the I that existed twenty years ago are not identical but are nonetheless the same.” There is no equality but rather continuity, which is why “each person’s identity is the
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result of the confluence and the divergence of her identifications” (Terricabras 2001). The facts and events that affect the subject’s states of consciousness, have, as Henri Bergson said (1959), a “duration” in space-time. They appear to be linked together, like a succession of film images (of photograms), where continuous impulses are superimposed. These superimpositions are like vital filaments that, through torsion and lateral adhesion, constitute the threads of our personal identity. Understanding the axes of personal identity as the results of a dynamic process of identification (and dis-identification) allows us (1) to distinguish the stages or the periods of human life by their intensity and their importance, but also allows us (2) to achieve a more complex understanding of the same axes of identity. The periodisation of the sentiment of identity is particularly interesting if we want to explain how in childhood and adolescence the succession of nodes of key moments of identity is more rapid and more intense: the degree of induced impacts of socialization received by the infant and the constant processes of appropriation, of rejections, and of re-appropriation (the learning and unlearning of models) that the infant feels illustrates very well, in a schematic way, the fact that we are crossing an important stage in the construction of the I. On the other hand, in the adult stage, where one supposes the existence of a strongly established identity (namely, a sense of self that is completely formed), the succession of cycles that close each new node or period of identity (which is to say, that justify each new sedimentation of identity, a new appropriation of past stratifications) is reduced and elongated in time. There also exists a vertical axis of identity, which accentuates the continuity and the temporal connectivity of the self, as well as its stability. This axis is composed, in reality, of a complex path of points on a spiral that corresponds, rightly, to the process of identification. The fragility and the instability of the process of acquiring identity and, above all, the difficulty of acquiring a certain level of integration and of coherence owing to successive crises over the reorganization of the self, explains, or justifies at least, the existence of certain pathologies of identity such as maladaptation and the problem of the acceptance of difference, which is seen sometimes in hatred towards others or even in self-hatred. (For example, these conditions might occur because someone wants to abandon a certain identity
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that is effectively impossible for that individual to abandon or because someone is incapable of assuming a desired identity). The psychologist Erik H. Erikson (1968) characterizes “normal” identity as a subjective and stimulating sensation of similitude and of stimulating continuity. The Latin id-entitas refers to the Spanish entitas tota of the I. It is not shocking that we would identify it using terms like self-consciousness, the sense of the I (ego feeling), the representation of the I, the image of the self, the perception of self, the continuity of the I, the persistence of the I, or ipséité. Ultimately, most of these expressions accentuate this element of continuity. On the other hand, the pathologies of identity are traditionally linked to expressions such as the disintegration of the I, confusions of identity, dispersion of identity, split, deviation or loss of identity, or dis-identification. The fragmentation, the disconnection, or the radical atomization of the subject signals the presence of one or many problems capable of making it difficult for the subject to handle change or of preventing the continuity (and the coherence) of the succession of instances that make up one’s life. This difficulty in managing continuity, change, and the fragmentation of identity has been observed by Emmanuel Mounier in his Traité du caractère (1988), where he advances the argument that the constancy of the I does not consist so much in maintaining an identity as it does in managing a dialectic tension between two opposite poles and in mastering passing crises. The dynamic vision of identities signifies, therefore, that we must accept the fact that ours will always be an identity capable of being questioned and that we must learn to manage the certain stability in the change, or, conversely, a feeling of stability of certain change. This mastering of tensions in the I requires, consequently, a second condition: the capacity for integration. Internal Integration/Unification and Differentiation or Exclusion In order to become a significant unity, besides the sensation of continuity, the subject requires a capacity for integration or for the internal unification of the variety of her experiences, of his idiosyncratic attributes or characteristics, and, conversely (yet at the same time), a capacity for differentiation or for the exclusion of others or for what he is not or for what he does not want to be. This is where the second fundamental element of the constitution of personal identity appears.
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The I is basically an agent, someone who develops actions. Action (and, as we see immediately, intelligible action) is what makes the existence of identity possible. The I considered as a whole must constitute a unity of action possessing a conscious reflex: it is an instance of reflection capable of organizing the different versions of itself. This signifies that we are entering into an analysis of action. Through developing an interpretive schema, we are able to approach it and to give it meaning. The agent has an identity because he possesses a capacity for self-interpretation in a context of procedure and dynamics: an environment of meaning where the subject internalizes and constructs his identity. The I is thus different from the sum of the collection of distinctive traits that compose it. The I is thus a unity formed through reflection. Acts of Narration There is no integration without narration. All human identity is thus a narrated identity. Each I exists or is self-constituted as such because of an act of narration. Identity is a narrative construct that tends to give meaning to a life lived. This is why Pierre Bourdieu (1989) spoke of the “biographical illusion”: we construct ourselves as characters in our own stories. In constructing ourselves as actors through these stories we ascribe a purpose to our actions. The historical continuity of our temporal totality and the capacity to provide a significant unity, a coherence and an intentional orientation to the moments or successive actions of our life, necessarily include an ensemble of attached narrative sequences, thanks to which each individual takes account of herself (of her actions, her attitudes, and her beliefs) and becomes the creator and constructor of the scenario of her own personality (“self-narration” here means something like constructing the novel or the film version of our life until the moment we create an immutable biography). Evidently, the acts that compose the subject’s narrative are immersed in the symbolic devices of a specific culture. This is what gives us the canonical models against which we measure our comportment. “We are not like spiders, which spin their webs with their own materials” (González 2003, 159). These patterns (or matrices) of comportments are equally patterns of narrative and of distinctive local grammars whose rules and conventions model our intentional practices and allow our actions to make sense.1 The particular
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narrative structure that organizes our history is the condition that makes possible the construction of this meaning. For this reason, acting always means carrying out an interpretative task – at its heart, it means situating my action in a precise cultural context that allows me the possibility of either acting or not. In other words, we do these two things (living and understanding the act of living) under narrative terms, trying to convey accounts of the frameworks of the stories in which we have played a role. Personal identity is nothing more than that. It is a dynamic, vital story, an account that we construct, that we use, revise, and transform through the different lived processes of identification and dis-identification, both of which are processes that we link to the stories of our socio-cultural context. This act of narration puts a biographical memory at our disposition. We use these accounts (of stories, of judgments, and of episodes) in order to understand the journeys, the itineraries, and the experiences of our lives, and in order to present them to others. To paraphrase Alberto Melucci (2001, 97), we talk about ourselves to those who are important to us. These acts of narration are acts of self-presentation made to others. Thus, our consciousness of the I is not a point of departure for these stories but the point at which we have arrived through the stories we tell. These accounts constitute the privileged key of mediation that is used to interpret us, to construct our own mental schema (about who we are and where we are, about what we do and the sense we give to our actions). This is why Alasdair Macintyre (1987), in his philosophy of action, asks what conditions make it possible for me to respond to the question, what will I do? Only if I find the answer to the preceding question, what is my history or what are my histories? The originality of the identity peculiar to one human life resides in the constitutive act of choosing narrative structures that give meaning to it. This act demands that the subject engage in an important act of self-reflection (one that gives rise to what is called an examined life, which is essentially a continued effort to understand one’s self). Access to the I requires a veritable act of conquest (a struggle for self). Above all, personal identity is acquired, it is not given. It is the result of a successful integration of the different voices (internal and external) and of the networks of communication that make up the subject. I am thus an I created through speech (a speech self). Succeeding in becoming someone is a rhetorical success. This success requires that we include our discursive type in the argumentative context of our community.
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Consequently, the narrative fight for identity must avoid three dangers: (1) the danger of fragmentation (unity of person depends on the successful unifying or integrating of different voices of the self into a coherent history, into a significant unity), (2) the danger of marginalization or rejection (we must know how to incorporate our account into our linguistic community), and (3) the danger of dilution or of dispersion (during a period of change, we must nonetheless strive to feel that we are still ourselves). Intra-Subjective and Inter-Subjective Recognition (Self-Recognition and Hetero-Recognition) Subjectivisation, or narrative expressions of personal idiosyncrasy (“I am characterized by, I am differentiated by, I identify myself as …”), require an inter-personal horizontal connection. In other words, they entail a relational dimensionality linked to a specific stable cultural environment, as well as a network of social memberships, which are transformed inside the framework of intelligibility (Charles Taylor (1994) calls this the horizon of meaning of a constitutive community). The narrative construction of the I is a shared construction at the heart of human communities. These communities allow the individual to make her choices while allowing the community to regulate in a deliberate and negotiated manner the acceptance of her difference. To speak of identity means not only to speak of the I through the eyes of others but also to speak of others through the eyes of the self. It is also a question of self-perception, perceiving ourselves as others see us. The intelligibility of our vital narratives depends on historical and cultural contexts. The place of recognition implies, as a consequence of its possibility, a linguistic potential for inter-subjectivity, a meeting point for the encounter of two narrative stories, that of the agent and that of the socio-cultural context of the collectivity that is welcoming the agent (which consists of nothing other than the life histories of others nearby). These others become part of our proper acts of narration and contribute to the writing of our life histories. The I is thus always an I intertwined within a web of collective values (Castiñeira 2004). Self-identification and self-differentiation are always related to a circular relationship of recognition by others and of reciprocal constitution. The observation that others recognize this similarity and this continuity makes one person important for other
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Theoretical Considerations
people; these others are similarly important to others in the nearby community. The individual is thus moulded by community contexts, but he contributes at the same time to the make-up of his social system.
From Personal to National Identity Personal identity is thus a dynamic and multiple narrative construction that requires inter-temporal connection (what I have called continuity). It is the capacity to integrate the collection of our experiences alongside the dialogical recognition of others. In the same way, I believe that it is possible to attribute to a collective framework of national identities a process of identity construction similar to what I have just discussed for the formation of the person. The questions, “Who am I?” and “Who are we?” might just as easily refer to an actor as to a group of social subjects. Each of these potential subjects acts as if there existed in them (or amongst them) a certain unity of continuity and of action. Each attributes a meaning to her actions. For the social sciences, nations are always conceptual realities, no more artificial, abstract, or constructed than the reality of individuals (Pérez Agote 1986).2 People and nations resemble each other because they are, up to a certain point, more artefacts than objects given by nature (Glover 2003). Nations are like all other collectivities. They play the role of real actors in the public sphere. As C. Ulises Moulines argues, we apply the statement “x is a nation” to entities that have a real but not directly observable existence. It is a question therefore of an attribute of a theoretical aspect that cannot consequently be reduced to observational or “phenomenological” attributes (Moulines 2002). John Searle and Neil MacCormick call this type of reality (a reality that is true for nations, as well as for all constructions of social identities) institutional facts: these are social and symbolic realities that are born through the assignation of a state to phenomena as a result of the actions of a collective acting intentionally (Bastida 2002). In other words, they are realities whose existence does not depend on their “physical” or “spatial” condition; they are “imagined communities” (Anderson 1993).3 They depend on propositional attitudes or on personal beliefs (Miller 1997). Nations, like personal identities, also depend equally on a number of things: on continuity (temporal, demographic, territorial, cultural, political), on internal and external recognition in order to give
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coherence and differentiation to the experiences of its members, and, as we will see later (in a much more detailed way), on constructing and interpreting the narrative identity of their own biographical memory – what I will call collective memory. For Luis Villoro, collectives identities are intersubjective representations shared by individuals within the same collectivity, representations that comprise beliefs, attitudes, and specific comportments that are communicated to each member as part of their membership in the same collective (Villoro 1998).4 In feeling, understanding, and acting in the world and in shared lives, it is necessary to explain oneself within a normative and cognitively stable framework. Whether it is in institutions, in regulated actions, or in the symbolic world (entangled inside culture – a culture that possesses artefacts, artistic objects, knowledge, and so on), culture is the condition that creates and preserves the vocabulary of our self-understanding. Collective identities manage, indirectly, a positive feeling of dignity, of selfesteem, and of pride at belonging to a specific group, which makes them often necessary for personal self-realisation. Taylor formulates three fundamental conditions that make collective identities possible: the existence of a moral horizon or a collection of values that are shared by the collective’s members, the existence of a will shared by the majority of actors to be united together into one common actor, and the recognition of the members by other important collectives (Castiñeira 1999). The always changing political and cultural history of a people, axiological pluralism, and the process of reinforcing the autonomy of the I (a characteristic of an advanced modernity) all contribute to the creation, as much on the individual plain as on the collective, of a more complex identity that tries to harmonize as much as possible the tensions between universalism and particularism, between autonomy and belonging. Thus, well before the current process of globalization, there existed numerous states that were composed of societies with complex identities whose internal national or cultural differences were already known. Yet very often (or practically always) these differences were repressed. Thus, multiculturalism appears at the precise moment when these societies become aware of the value of their identities and when these societies demand publicly that it be recognized and that it have a place in the fundamental structures of the state. In response to this, anti-assimilationism, anti-uniformism, or the refusal
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of cultural homogenisation constitute the least agreeable sides of the arguments that aim to break with the previous version of the modern schemes of domination and of cultural exclusion and that aim to protect differentiated cultural identities and to guarantee their expression in the public sphere. The current era of globalization only augments the number of factors that challenge identities; it creates new diasporas, new cultural hybridisation, the formation of new borders, and new migratory patterns. These are all elements that test shared identities and that involve important transformations. Within the framework of this general situation, the case of Catalonia constitutes a veritable laboratory for identities, as much at an abstract as at a concrete day-to-day level. In one way, this is because today we Catalans continue to discuss with the Spanish state our place in its structures and our need for recognition (which constitutes the keystone of our demands as Catalans for reforming the Statute of Autonomy). Yet in another way, this is because our society continues to change. New immigrants are not willing to wait in the doorway while we resolve our problems; they enter directly into the kitchen of our house and have no intention of leaving. Because I have discussed in other articles the subject of the accommodation of Catalonia at the heart of the Spanish state, I am going to turn to the relationship between national identity and the different uses of collective memory (see, for example, Castiñeira 2001). In what follows, I will try to explain how certain collective identities become national identities. National Culture National culture is a symbolic system shared by a group of people who from a temporal point of view play the role of mediators between the past and the future. This role, at the same time, gives meaning to their lives and mobilizes sentiments (of solidarity, belonging, and loyalty, for example) that unite them so that they can live together in the present. We understand the symbols as the visual or the physical expressions that refer to or lead us back to identification with certain ideals, beliefs, values, or sentiments (shared by a human collectivity) that serve to reinforce our sense of community, to intensify social bonds, and to aid us in structuring our society. When we speak of a national culture, we refer to a trans-historic
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symbolic system that permits a nation to become “a laboratory of experience, of inter-spatial and inter-temporal comparisons, capable of placing us within a perspective that offers us continuity” (Braudel 1993, 19). National culture permits a group to become conscious of itself. It allows groups to define models of basic socialisation, to prescribe certain comportments, to reinforce an ensemble of shared values, and to provide the public space with a certain formal organization. National culture is a form of collective life with a shared repertory of beliefs, lifestyles, values, and symbols, a culture that, as a consequence, gives form to a way of thinking, perceiving, and feeling that is felt by each of its members (Llobera 2003a). National Identity Group self-consciousness derived from national culture is one of the elements that allow us to speak of national identity. National identity corresponds to a process by which an ensemble of ideals and values inherited from the past (historical memories, myths, values, traditions, and symbols) are formed into a collective memory that members of a specific nation share, giving them a distinctive patrimony or forming an ensemble with which they begin to identify themselves (Smith 1999). According to Anthony D. Smith (1997), the standard Western model of national identity includes the following elements: a historic territory or homeland, a political community, the politico-legal equality of its members, a collective civic culture formed out of historical memories and collective myths, and a unified economy that allows territorial mobility for its members. Just as for personal identity, in which the subject’s process of identification is continuous and dynamic, for national identities each new generation reconstitutes and transforms the ethno-symbolic components that form part of their distinctive ethnic patrimony. However, even if certain components, such as language, may be fundamental, no element can be considered absolutely perpetual and definitive. National Culture and Collective Memory The elements of the symbolic system of national cultures include music, poetry, language, geography or territory, history, flags, maps,
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myths, the lives and actions of heroes and famous celebrities, books, monuments, public spaces, emblems, commemorative ceremonies, and so on. As members of a society, we often speak of social mechanisms or of material or immaterial objects present in the social imagination that play a symbolic role, one that is often linked with memory. They make present what is absent, they allow social or national groups to remember together, to have a common identity, to succeed in moving from the multiple experiences and memories that are represented individually to the uniqueness of collective memory. Paul Ricoeur defines memory (or the mnemonic phenomenon) as the presence in spirit of an absent object – one that no longer exists but that did exist. Memory, be it evoked simply by a presence (for example, as pathos), or be it evoked by an active process of recollection (the final conclusion of an experience of recognition), is a representation. Furthermore, Ricoeur defines collective memory as a selection of imprints left by events that affect the course of history for a group of people and through which we recognize the power to present the common or shared memories on the occasion of holidays, of rituals, or of public celebrations (Ricoeur 2003).5 When he speaks of an ethics of collective memory, Avishai Margalit (2002) distinguishes between common memory (the accumulation of individual memories concerning some specific lived episode) and a shared memory (a memory that integrates the different perspectives of all the members who lived through an event into a unique version). Collective memory has an obvious link with what Margalit calls shared memories, which he associates with a community of memory or a community of remembrance. The virtue of shared remembering rests in the fact that it permits the inclusion of synchronic and diachronic aspects of memory. A member of a community of remembrance is linked to the memories of his generation, as well as to the memories of the preceding and future generations, in a succession of generational transitions that are projected through time: under the form of a (past) heritage, a (present) engagement, or a (future) project. As such, we attribute to a shared memory the following five characteristics. 1 Every shared memory (cultural, political, or spiritual) is associated with a tradition. It is a closed memory (it is the only unique version of the past that the community authorizes as part of the
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3 4 5
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canon – this is what differentiates it from the critical work of historians). The shared memory of an historic event that predates the experiences of all those still alive is known as the memory of the memories. A distant shared memory does not relate as much to a real historic event as to the story of that event. For that reason, collective memory is more a type of belief than of knowledge. Shared memory has a sense of being a living memory. The significance of an account of a shared memory causes the community to relive its essence, to transform it anew as a life experience, as a reenergizing element. This reanimation (which is also to a lesser degree an act of commemoration) is, according to Margalit (2002, 59), not “only an act of identification, but an act of real identity.” We relive the memory and, in a spiritual sense, relive the experience of our ancestors. The memory thus provides an opportunity for the survival (and for the projection) of the community.
There are many correlations between Margalit’s reflections and the philosophy of Ernest Renan when Renan argues (2001, 29) that every nation possesses “a rich common wealth of memories.” These are, at the end of the day, the unities of meaning or the symbolic fragments that the will of individuals or time has transformed into constitutive elements of a community. Precisely because the fragility of collective identities depends on their continued existence (or, to put it another way, on their difficult relationship to temporality), the desire for continuity (expressed in the cultural and political dimensions of nationalism)6 is projected onto the mobilization of memory, which (as an act of narration) ends up by becoming the guardian of identity, a tool used for justifying the nation’s existence, while at the same time being used to constitute and integrate the nation. The Places of Memory For the reason just discussed in the previous section, some of the composing factors of national cultures are at the same time the mechanisms of national construction, as well as being the real places of remembrance. They are the places of memory; they are highly
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Theoretical Considerations
symbolic, as they allow us to reappraise the specific memories of the past under the guise of images and to integrate them into our system of values.7 The elaboration of memory within the framework of the construction of national identity to which I am referring includes a process for retrospective projection (into the past) that permits us to legitimate the present in order to give a real meaning to the actual context in which it is enunciated. In this sense, memory has not so much a historical function as an instrumental, political function. It is a question of transforming it into a process of “objectification” of the past, allowing the delimitation or the symbolic differentiation of the identity of a national community (Nora 1984; Michonneau 2002). To a greater extent, the places of memory are the fundamental elements for the symbolic production of national difference. Following Pierre Nora, one could say that national histories are constituted out of a multitude of places of memories, of exemplary or edifying episodes loaded with a symbolic, emotive, and persistent signification.8 If the past, as Fernand Dumont argues, sends us its tides, the places of memories are “the shellfish that remain behind on the seashore when the sea has withdrawn from living memory” (Nora 1984, xxiv). They are islands from the past, conserved for the future; they are reminders, inscriptions, indicators, or exterior signs that tend to protect us from forgetfulness. They are the authentic material imprints where the past lives on, is remembered and transmitted; they are the elements or the practices that organize the production of a social sense of the past, as well as a collective identity. They are the places or the spaces where memory is incarnated and represented, giving meaning and orientation to the community’s historic journey. They are collective accounts that have succeeded in founding over time certain events and places where they have written our memories, reinforced by commemorations, monuments, and public celebrations. Nora attributes three meanings to the term “places of memory”: (1) a material sense, that is, memory as a repository or an archive that determines the places of memory that are “given” as actually usable; (2) a symbolic sense (for example, a minute of silence), in which places of memory are capable of maximizing meaning through very few signs and which, through the imagination, guarantees the crystallisation and transmission of memories; and (3) a functional sense (as in a scholarly manual, a testament, an association of veterans, elections), in which memory is capable of leading to rituals.
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The construction of tradition occurs to a large degree out of the management of memories, of the itineraries of chosen memories, of the means of selecting, framing, interpreting, and evaluating the links of memories, and the method of dramatizing the accounts (the constitutive myths or legends), or the disposition of sacred centres for historical pilgrimage. Moreover, beyond the memorialist task of temporal dating, we must also localize singular places. Time, as place, is constructed socially because the spaces of memories are also the memory of places. Often, our memories are closely linked to spaces (topoi, loci), to a space or a precise location (national territory, homeland, Heimat, countryside) laden with meaning, or perhaps to a historical event “that happened there.”9 This is how patriotic histories and geographies (Heimatkunde) are constructed. In the study of the mythical topography of Christianity that is linked to the sites of cults (the Sea of Galilee, Mount Zion, the Mount of Olives, Golgotha, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and so on), Maurice Halbwachs (1941) found that one key element was always present to support collective belief.10 In a conscious or unconscious way, we create a relationship between our memories and the sites that we consider important, worthy of veneration or pilgrimage.11 The process of national construction of a space functions in the same way. “Territory,” writes James Anderson, “is a receptacle for the past in the present. The exceptional history of a nation materializes in the exceptional section of land occupied by the nation. It is the earth mother, the primitive land of the ancestors, older than any other state. This land itself was witness to great acts, to the mythic origins. Time passes away but space remains.”12 In this way, national construction occurs alongside a process of the territorialization of history and of the historicity of territory that takes shape visually and symbolically in the landscape. The cartography of memory, at the end of the day, becomes projected onto space. For example, in Catalan national topography, which includes important sites like Montserrat, Mount Canigou, the Monasteries of Poblet and Santa María de Ripoll, we also find places of shame, of death, of humiliation, and of pain symbolically re-conquered as monuments dedicated to life. Such was the case with the Citadel of Barcelona (a defensive fortress constructed by the Castilian troops of Bourbon following Barcelona’s defeat in 1714 and intended to avoid a revolt by the Catalans), which was transformed at the end of
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Theoretical Considerations
the nineteenth century by the inhabitants of Barcelona into a civic park (populated with statues and busts representing famous people, notably famous Catalans).13 The Chateau du Montjuïc is another such example (there, on 15 October 1940, the president of the Autonomous Catalan Government, Lluís Companys, was shot by Franco’s troops). Ultimately, on 27 October 1985 the Fossar de la Pedrera was inaugurated on the site of the ancient chateau dedicated to the memory of all the Catalans executed under Franco. The Fossar de les Moreres, the old parochial cemetery where the defenders of the city of Barcelona were buried in 1714, has been transformed today into a monument to the struggle for Catalonian independence. Still more recently, under certain parts of the old market of Born (built between 1873 and 1876), eight thousand square metres of archaeological ruins were discovered from when the city was razed in the eighteenth century by Philip V. Some of these sites have been transformed into veritable itineraries for civic processions within the urban area of Barcelona, containing within it a strong symbolism (I am thinking particularly of the site of the statute dedicated to Rafael Casanova.)14 It is important to understand the complex mechanisms and dynamics of collective memory. In particular, we must understand 1 The mechanisms of selection and of memorializing the memories and the profile of those who are responsible for the act of selection, 2 The mechanisms of reception, of maintenance, of education, and of the transmission of memory (rememoration,15 commemoration,16 repetition,17 order, stylization, association, or chronological ordering of events or of singular or constitutive episodes), 3 The mechanisms by which memories are updated and reinterpreted, the methods of making peace with the past and of waking the memory, but also, 4 The mechanisms of and the usefulness of forgetfulness.18 All these elements contribute to the construction of collective memories, to the rewriting of stories that (a) contribute to the continuity of the nation’s shared memories; (b) create emotional links of identification, of belonging, of loyalty and of inclusion; and (c) delimit the nation’s lines of cultural differentiation from those of other nations.
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To a large degree, collective memory is the central composing factor of and what gives continuity to national identity. It is also what permits national (re)construction, particularly because it favours the progressive familiarization of actors with the past through an initiating path of acculturation that uses stories passed on from generation to generation. These stories form a trans-generational link; they constitute a familial web (networks of kinship, of primary groups and of social groups, and so on), leading up to access to the elders’ memories. By a process of interiorization, the groups influence the constitution of the collective consciousness by bringing forth memories that have been marked with affect. Because of the declarative dimension of memory, they assist in constructing a bridge that allows us to pass on our lived memory. This bridge allows us to make our lived memory a historical memory, one that is maintained and transmitted by past generations up to the point that it becomes an integral memory that unites individual memory, collective memory, and historical memory. The past, the present, the space of experience, and the horizon of expectations are also related to each other. They favour at the same time, on the symbolic plain, the feeling of a nation being united.19 When this process is finished, national identity is transformed into a revolutionary project capable of converting a population into a people and of making a people an autonomous collective subject. The Imagined Dimension of Collective Memory The symbolic systems that I have been talking about are thus discursive formations, or dynamic narrative mechanisms, that promote national construction. As I have already said, every national story includes a certain interpretation, selection, adaptation, and manipulation of the historical memory, as well as the integration or assimilation of new cultural traits in the present. In each national community’s symbolic system, there is always a part that could be described as historical continuity and a part that, as Anderson (1993) says, is being constructed or imagined. According to Bernard Lewis (1979), there is always in each community a recalled history (a community’s collective memory), a rediscovered history (rediscovered by historians and serving as the basis for national reconstruction), and, in certain cases, an invented history that, because of manipulation
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Theoretical Considerations
and abuse, can end up imposing itself if institutional or scholarly narratives have been transformed into authorized history or transformed into official commemorations. As I will argue later, it is not surprising that the temptation to close off identity or to control memory or to attempt to impose or to patriotize a certain model of memory would provoke cultural battles or the construction of new memories among the members of the same nation. However, the imagined or invented dimension of the collective memory should not be evaluated in a negative way or from the distorted position of lived experienced but should also above all be seen as a necessary reflexive component of the act of representing memories. Cornelius Castoriaidis (1988) has already noticed this. He has offered two different definitions of the collective imagination: (1) that of an absolutely invented history, and (2) that of a displacement of meaning attributed to the available symbols, in other words, the capacity of a group of people to give meaning to a symbol that is apparently meaningless to others. It is this second definition of imagination that I want to stress here, because the essential factors that determine the existence of a nation are not its tangible characteristics (which are themselves always capable of undergoing substantial transformation) but the image that its members have of themselves (Connor 1998). There is no identity without memory and no memory without intelligence, namely without the labour of consciousness (Halwachs 1950). Memory and consciousness are one and the same thing. Belonging to a national culture implies appropriation, interiorisation, and the sharing of a precise symbolic and cultural universe, namely a set, or core group, of characteristic social representations and above all the possession of the interpretative key of meaning for these representations.20 However, it is not as important to hold on to the contents of the national culture as it is to hold on to the system of links that organize these contents. If we did not participate in the collective’s symbolic network, the attribution of meaning to group actions (either past or present) would be impossible or hopelessly incorrect; we would not know how to read, to understand, or to evaluate facts. Remembering, in the sense that we use the word, also signifies the act of imagining; in other words, it is presenting the spirit, within a precise shared symbolic network, with a memory of an object that no longer exists. It is to try to fill our intelligence with a complex
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system of representations. We try to replace the absence of reality (in the act of recalling) with the presence in our spirit. There are at least three links that form the conceptual chain of the discourse of memory: presence, absence, and representation. Memory is therefore always a reflexive memory. It must reread absence and presence, distance and actuality. It must succeed, through intellectual effort, in changing a schematic representation into a representation replete with images. When we remember or when we imagine, we do not present (and we invent even less) but we re-present, we transform the mental trace of the event into an account.21 When we do so, the declarative dimension of memory is loaded with immanent interpretations of the account itself. In the case of collective memory, each subject must be capable of relating the personalized process of representation to the socially acceptable version or versions of shared memories – what Margalit (2002) called the canonical version. Far from resting simply on a recuperation of the past, identities are the different containers in which we are placed and in which others place us in the narratives of the past, the discursively constructed forms with a capacity to configure a national subject (Fishman 2001). For this reason, the reality of national identities is better perceived by the analysis of stories and images of those who represent the imagined community to others (in other words, it is better perceived by the representations the subjects have of themselves) (Smith 1999). As a consequence, the national community, to the extent that it both (re)actualizes and gives continuity to the past, is an imagined political community (Anderson 1993). Nevertheless – and I want to insist on this point – imagining does not necessarily mean inventing nations where they did not previously exist (Gellner 1994), creating a fiction or falsifying history (Kedourie 1988), or, as Eric Hobsbawm (1988) said, practising a deliberate exercise in social engineering on the part of the governing class and the bourgeoisie. National communities are imagined but not imaginary. All forms of cultural identity (not only national identity) imply a concrete way of imagining, a specific way of using the intersubjective resources of language and of culturally representing ourselves. Anderson (1993, 23) characterizes the nation as an imagined political community because members of each nation “will never know the majority of their compatriots, nor will they ever see them or hear of them. That said, in each of their minds lies the image of their communion.”22 The
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national collective is an abstraction out of which its members construct a concept (or an image) with which they self-identify. From this point of view, nationality is nothing more than a symbolic and communicative mechanism around which individuals imagine themselves as united and can identify with their neighbours (Barker 2003). What we do is nothing more than to construct ourselves discursively from the descriptions of ourselves that we normally use to identify ourselves. We exist in and we describe ourselves through language. In the end, national identity becomes a representation or a selfimage (or a set of shared representations) with which we identify ourselves. That is why in our current information society political battles for identities often end up becoming (narrative or cultural) battles to define identifications; they are battles to obtain power and thus to produce the national “we” and to obtain semantic authority over a particular group. When we associate personal memory, collective memory, and historical memory, we represent narratively a certain hermeneutic of nationhood. The consciousness of belonging and of national continuity renders necessary the account of identity itself, through the careful selection of an ensemble of linguistic signs that are capable of changing. The dynamic schema of the constitutive process of national identity is completed by the Gadamerian idea of the fusion of horizons in which, according to the German philosopher Hans Georg Gadamer, three fundamental horizons are present in all hermeneutic situations: (1) the historical and cultural horizon in which all interpreters are situated, (2) the horizon of past phenomena that the interpreters use to try to understand the present (through vertical interpretation), and (3) the extra-cultural horizon with which the interpreters enter into contact (through horizontal interpretation). Gadamer’s schema permits us to better understand the significance of national identity derived from the constant interaction of diverse horizons (Karmis 2003). That is why Nora says that memory “is a form of permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and of forgetting, unaware of its successive deformations, vulnerable to all other civilizations, capable of being manipulated, susceptible to long periods of latency and of constant revitalizations” (1984, xix). These acts of narration are polysemic; the work of reinterpretation is constant as we project onto these acts our expectations and our anticipations. Memory continues to live on vigorously; memory
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remains living to the extent that it continues to have a capacity for interpellation, for influencing the present, for maintaining, because of its new rereading at a level of national signification. Memory remains alive not only to the extent that we reproduce it in its textual signification but also in that memory ultimately becomes a production of political actors in the present. The Dangers of Memory There is more than one dimension to the issue of collective memory and forgetfulness and its concomitant dangers and sicknesses.23 Four valid dimensions can occur at this moment. Each affects the subject in very different ways. On the one hand, there are the “assassins of memory” (in Yosef Haym Yerushalmi’s words), namely, those people who have claimed or still claim to deny, even today, the existence of the Holocaust (the Shoah). By trying to erase memory, for example, they succeed in creating inhumanity. Similarly, there are those who comprise the (collective) “manipulators of memory,” those who want to ideologically instrumentalize it, especially from the founding of states, when certain acts of aggression and acts of conquest and original violence are later legitimated by a state that exists in a precarious legal position (Ricoeur 2003). This is what we mean when we say that history is written by the victors. On the other hand, there are those who are oppressed by memory, in other words, those who are oppressed by the trauma of remembering the past, which includes three different things. First, there is the oppression of Holocaust survivors like Yehuda Elkana, survivors who want to “learn how to forget,” to learn how to “eradicate from their lives the oppression of remembering” (Rossi 2001). Second, there is an oppression understood as “excess of memory,” as an abuse of memory or an obsession with remembering experienced humiliation that ends up becoming a self-destructive commemoration, as was the case during the war in the Balkans and continues to be the case in Northern Ireland and the Middle East (Ricoeur 1995; 2003). And third, there is the oppression of those who defend the critical force and the interpellative testimony of the suffering of victims (memory passionis – the memory of the conquered, of distant suffering) as a moral imperative, as a basic orientation or practical intention guiding all actions related to human liberty (which is the case with Walter Benjamin, Johannes
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Baptist Metz, and Reyes Mate), in which case the victims’ memory becomes a central hermeneutic category for all theories and liberating practices, it becomes a moral memory that transforms the remembrance of suffering into a new categorical imperative; in this way thinking and weighing, reflecting and suffering, passion and compassion are linked together. Finally, there are those who are “repressed by memory,” in other words, those who flee the past, who practice an “excess of forgetting,” who have inhibited their history for fear of accepting responsibility, those who appear to be afraid of the subversive aspects of remembering, those who live in the terrifying prison of remembrance without being able to tell their stories. Margalit and Ricoeur describe, for example, how the French population, in its efforts to protect the prestige of France in the face of powerful memories of Vichy and the war in Algeria, repressed their memories, making them disappear (with the aide of De Gaulle), out of fear of what an examination of these memories might bring (Margalit 2002; Ricoeur 1995).24 A detailed study of these and other examples permits us to develop at least four different general ways of dealing with the past: (1) that of remembering and of memory, (2) that of silence and of forgetting, (3) that of alteration and of tergiversation, and (4) that of refusing to consider the past and of wanting to ignore it (Defez 2003). What I want to stress and clarify now is why (collective) memory is so often accused of being arbitrarily manipulated. One of the reasons why people often erroneously claim that memory is in danger of being fictionalized or manipulated resides is the way in which the process of perception of a significant lived experience for a group is understood – that this in turn will lead to the same act of selection of memories. Here we must remember that, as we saw in the case of personal identity, in the processes of identification we never passively or aseptically receive the impacts of the lived events (which means that we do not take into account only the production of affection) but that there is always an active and adapted reception to our specific contexts of life (which we could call the subjective conditions of reception). We interpret simultaneously the elements that are important to us (positively or negatively) and, to the extent that they determine the milestones of our journey, we persist in the desire to preserve and to remember them. We do not deny the existence of certain events, but others seem to be excluded because they are not sufficiently important to the history of the
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nation to retain (Miller 1997). That is why some people (Northern Irelanders or Catalans) have never forgotten certain events, while others (the English or the Spanish, for example) have done nothing to remember or to interpret them in the same way.25 The following expression about history has been attributed to the North American bishop Fulton Sheen: “The British never remember it, the Irish never forget it.”26 The social and above all the institutional act of forgetting the primitive violence committed during the founding of nation-states is commonplace. For this reason, if the nation is a community of memory, we can also say that it is also a community of forgetting (Palti 2003). Better yet, it is a community that must forget its own forgetfulness.27 The phrase written on every license plate in Quebec, je me souviens, plays on the obligation to remember the defeat on the Plains of Abraham in 1759, something anglophone Canada wants to forget.28 Tzvetan Todorov spoke recently of a case study (undertaken by the North American historian John Dower in 1995) of the differences between American and Japanese ways of remembering the events that led to the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima.29 Dower showed that memory is not a neutral moral point of view. Hiroshima is either “a synonym of victimization” (in Japan), or “a symbol of triumph” (in the United States). Both countries, moreover, have chosen different places of remembrance and have put different things on display in their respective museums. The National Air and Space Museum (part of the Smithsonian) in Washington chose the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima (and helped end the Second World War) to commemorate the events at Hiroshima. The museum at Hiroshima, on the other hand, chose the eating dish of a twelve-year-old child killed during the bombing, which happened to be preserved with rice and beans roasted by the atomic explosion inside it. The Smithsonian had to cancel an exhibit showing the same bowl because American veterans considered it an “offence to memory” (Todorov 2003). This process of perception and of selection goes beyond the temptation (real and often abusive) to falsify or to manipulate historical memory. There exists, therefore, a certain confusion between the role played by memory in the creation of nations and national identification, and the scientific pretensions of the historian. “Forgetting, and I dare say, misinterpreting history itself are important factors for the formation of a nation,” according to Renan (2001, 21). The
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quote might be valid so long as it is not confused with the work of interpretation and of evaluation of significant lived experiences for us (as members of the same nation) with the critical and analytical goal, shared by historians, of understanding everything. Our life, and our perception and estimation of the lived, formed afterwards by shared memory, belief and tradition, do not have much in common with the scientific method, abstract, external and supposedly neutral for reconstructing historical facts.30 What is important in the national memory of the past is not the truth but its significance. It is not a rigorously written history but the subjective perception of lived or emotionally transmitted episodes that ends up being important in the formation and the continuation of nations.31 In this way, the historical authenticity of the commemoration of beliefs is not important for the collective memory and is in fact secondary, if not totally useless. It is not the greatest objectivity or subjectivity of the identity referent that determines its importance as a constitutive element of collective identity but its symbolic auto- and heteroappropriation (Valenzuela 2000). As for the beliefs that make up a collective identity, we can say whether they are more or less efficient, but it makes no sense to evaluate their scientific truth or falsity. In all cases, “the discourse disqualifying a collective identity, realized from science, is one more discourse among those that play (or fight) for dominance in the social sphere” (Pérez Agote 1986). I would dare say that the power of power within each tradition can become so strong that we become obliged to ask ourselves the question, Can historians or social scientists really situate themselves outside or beyond these groups, especially since they themselves have been formed by memory and the scope of their vision is similarly situated (in other words, since they normally share the social representations of their collective of belonging or of reference)?32 The other motives for most complaints that memory has been manipulated, distorted, or invented usually resides in the violation of the reasonable margins of interpretation of memory. What Halbwachs calls the social frameworks of memory are only the instruments used by conscious individuals to recompose an image or an ensemble of images of the past in order to help frame their needs in the present.33 To do that, the redefinitions of tradition and of memory “must not be considered simply as an invention or a creation of the intellectuals, because they are attempts to unify the understanding of the Western processes of the formation of nations”
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with the rediscovery or the reinterpretation of the past (Smith 1997). From the challenges of the present, collective memory assures us simultaneously of the durability of memory (as well as of the will and the desire to remember) and of its potential to transform. This is the blinding proof of the open character of national identities; in other words, they are transformed as they are linked to the ensemble of mediations with which they intervene historically. In the truthful dimension or pretension of memory, we find, inevitably, a dialectical character between the demand that we be loyal to facts, to the evaluation of the experience of the past, and to the need to adapt to the present. The places of memory, to continue with Nora’s expression, can increase or diminish in importance or significance according to the present needs of national groups. For nations, therefore, memory becomes an affirmation of their identity, a more or less successful expression of their will to survive in time and to outlive attempts to erase them from memory (memory that has been prevented, obliged, or manipulated). This is what, after all, can transform memory into a new project (Castiñeira 2001). Some Crisis Situations: Conflicts of Identity and Identities in Conflict Finally, I want to comment on three situations that highlight the crisis in maintaining current national identities. the negative perception of collective identity itself. For various historical, political, and cultural reasons, many national identifies enter into crisis by projecting onto themselves a contradictory feeling of dis-identification and loss of self-esteem. It is this perception that generates a sense of frustration, that is demoralizing, and that promotes an inferiority complex and self-hate. Catalonia and Quebec, for example, lived through similar processes, what Jocelyn Maclure has called “melancholic nationalism,” a process that was born of the traumatic memory of having had to fight through a long period of purgatory in order to “survive” and of having had to fight against the constant menace of assimilation and mental colonisation (Maclure 2003). The process of minoritization, derived from a defeat extending over a period of centuries (from 1714 in Catalonia and from 1759 in Quebec), would have favoured the development of an ensemble of pathological traits unique to a
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neurosis based in identity or to a profound injury to the capacity for self-representation (as in self-punishment, masochism, self-referential contempt, depression, lack of enthusiasm, or cultural fatigue) that would lead, as I have said, to a loss of self-esteem, to a chronic inferiority complex, and to a progressive national alienation that would manifest itself by a political ambiguity of identity, which has become characteristic of Catalonia and Quebec. Maclure, following Fernand Dumont, claims that Quebec’s identity has become problematic and confused. Since its birth, it has taken, “the form of an abortion, of a conquest, of a multi-dimensional subordination, of the slow but progressive assimilation of the degrading vision of the other, of a constitution of self-consciousness founded on feelings of contempt and shame, of ambiguity. It is, in other words, a form of legendary political pusillanimity” (Maclure 2003, 52). Similarly, making a terrible play on words, one could say that Catalan alie-nation is, in part, the result of a bizarre hiber-nation. It would be a good idea to specify that the negative perception of collective identity itself does not necessarily lead to self-hatred or to the apathy of memory. Aleia Assmann (1994), in a genealogical study of the construction of German national and cultural memory (die Bildung), argues that the painful memories of Auschwitz constitute a national catastrophe that shattered German cultural memory and that instead of transforming the memory of Germans into an apathetic memory, stimulated a critical and pointed interest in the complex function of the memory in the history of their country. If, as Assmann says, “after a destruction of community spirit as fanatical as it was systematic, Germany could find itself, after its apocalypse, at a point zero of cultural memory,” the question Germans must ask is, what cultural traditions can they still feel that they have inherited (84)? The idea of progress and of continuity associated with the Bildung has been destroyed in an even more radical way by the experience of the Jewish genocide organized by Hitler’s government. In the face of this eruption of horror in German history, the Bildung remains silent. It cannot be the inheritor of tradition but must remain like a memory of German history (Assmann 1994, 104). Spanish national history has also experienced a similar situation, in part because of the long series of exceptional historical failures that have distanced it from bourgeois industrial movements and European intellectual ideas and above all from the heritage of
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Francoism and the weight of recent memory. In this last case, the attempt to impose an exclusive and intolerant idea of Spain, which conflates the Spanish language with the very ideology of the Francoist authoritarian regime, caused the new Spanish democracy to be constructed on a weak base of nationalism, one that was neurotic and often full of shame stemming from the apparent loss of the nationalist message. The identification of contemporary Spanish nationalism with Francoism and its negatives characteristics and connotations (national-Catholicism and its axioms – a Spain that is the death of heretics, the light of Trent, the sword of Rome, the cradle of Saint Ignatius – essentialism, integrism, traditionalism, the extreme right, Castilianism, institutional militarism, anti-Europeanism, and uniformist centralism) constitutes the key reasons for its de-legitimisation and its rejection until at least the 1990s. It was from that date, which corresponds to the public projection of the image of Spain as a “normalized, homologous, reconciled, democratized, de-traditionalized, European and modern” state that in a little less than twenty years, pride in being Spanish passed “from the rear-guard to the avant-guard,” to use the terms of Emilio Lamo de Espinosa.34 Different analysts have detected an attempt to recover Spanish patriotism and to renew nationalist discourse, both on the political left and right (Nuñez Seixas 1999; Péréz Garzon 2000). This new scenario, which certain Spanish historians (like Santos Julià, David Ringrose, and Isabel Burdiel) call “the end of the myth of failure” and the beginning of the project of a positive Spanish selfperception of complaisance and optimism, is very much related to the renewal of Spanish nationalism. According to Xosé Manoel Núñez, the more liberal component of the right tried to use this project by appealing to the pre-war historical, liberal, nationalist democratic heritage and by rediscovering figures like Azaña, Madariaga, and Ortega y Gasset. At the same time, the left looked back to a tradition of regenerationism, Europeanism, and nationalist republicanism (Núñez Seixas 1999). the lack of internal cohesion or of the capacity for actualizing national identity. The crisis of collective memory could also originate from a series of new factors: (1) the end of the peasant lifestyle (the end of rural ways of life), the loss of places of memory, the aging or the end of signification for certain places of memory, the degradation or the limitation of the lifespan of certain
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symbols – monuments that were originally conceived to last, becoming the irremediable witnesses to the ephemera of life; (2) the development of internal cultural battles (the existence of collective historical memories on the same territory that fight to interpret differently the events and the persons that they refer to (Smith 1999) or the symbolic fights between collective identities in competition – the competitive processes of identity building; and (3) the reaction to a new process of making sacred or to a new abusive patrimonialization of the (official) memory. the instability of memory as a consequence of the process of cultural modernisation. One more reason for the crises in national identities is related to certain consequences derived from the constitution of the modern I that are based on the voluntary adoption of a precise identity. Modern critical reason has always found it difficult to accept that someone could actually have chosen an identity when they have never openly debated it. The modern subject is constructed in part from the contrast between identity based on tradition and identity imposed by tradition. This permits the accentuation of individualism. Yet, it is not so much modernity in itself but some of its consequences or its deviations that reinforce a certain individualist tendency. Taylor (1994) calls this the malaise of modernity, one of whose consequences is the tendency towards individualism, which rests on the ideology of the more egocentric forms of self-realisation, forms that lead inevitably to social atomisation.35 The rejection of the three inherent virtues that constitute the modern I (what Taylor calls the degradation of the moral ideal of authenticity: freewill, liberty, and responsibility) end up contributing to the development of a narcissistic identity, one that is egocentric and mystified. In other words, the rejection contributes to certain of the worst forms of subjectivism: banal-trivial identity or simulated identity. Ferran Sàez describes contemporaneousness as the double phenomenon that is apparently self-contradictory: the inflammation of the I and the dissolution of the subject; it is the simultaneous exaltation and erosion of the I (Sàez 2003). The consequence, as far as the argument goes, is the fissure of the I into multiple belongings. The multiplication of voices of the I in advanced modernity makes it more difficult to pursue the self, but also our self-continuity. The
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struggle for the self is also a struggle for us. The banal exaltation of the I contributes to the dissolution of the we. The pseudo-liberation of the I demands the heavy price of social dis-insertion. The result, according to Taylor (1994, 138), is fragmentation, “a people less and less capable of fixing their common objectives and of obtaining them ... A fragmented society is a society whose members have more and more difficulty in identifying their political society as their community.” At the end of it all, the processes of cultural modernisation destabilize, in an accelerated way, the continuity of historical memory by softening and by further restructuring its semantic core. The socalled time for homogenous national narratives has passed. Authors like Raymond Williams and Néstor García Canclini have sometimes argued that there exists the possibility of a division between what they call residual (national) identity (the understanding between members of a nation who imagine the past, always dreaming of the possibility of re-establishing this imagined unity and of maintaining a historical heritage of traditions) and a postmodern emergent identity, whose defenders no longer fear moving from the imagined community to an imaginary one cast in a possible future. For these defenders, identities cannot be given other than in a contingent, partial, or fragmented way, a way that implies that the principal community of identification (imagined or imaginary) is no longer the nation but the minority, the marginal subjects, the group of young people, the urban tribe, the neighbourhood, or indeed any other form of de-territorialized community with its own contra-histories and capable of articulating new discursive constructions constituted of anti-essentialist random identities. The complexity and the multiplication of repertoires within identities, the widening of spheres of belonging, the pluralisation of societies, and the emergence, through the media, of previously unknown forces affecting the assignation of identity (I must say in passing that the development of the Internet and other media further reinforces the idea that every collective identity is an imagined identity), such as the re-territorialization, the hybridisation, the inter-culturality, and the cosmopolitisation of experiences are all elements that make it more difficult for the pessimist to construct a coherent and unified base that is deeply rooted and capable of serving society’s subjects, and for the optimist (such as Jürgen Habermas) to protect the
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subject by giving him a relative capacity for discrimination, for selection, and for the assignation of identity. These are collectively defined as the aspects that make up post-traditional identity.
notes 1 I have already developed this point in my study of the transmission of values (Castiñeira 2004). 2 Smith defines a nation as “a human population that carries an exact name, that occupies a historical territory, that shares myths, memories, a common public culture, a unique economy, and that gives equal legal rights and obligations for all of its members” (1999, 131). Montserrat Guibernau gives the following definition of a nation: “a human group conscious of forming a community sharing a common culture, linked to a clearly defined territory, with a common past, a collective project for the future, claiming the right to self-determination” (1996, 58). Combining the two definitions, I want to stress that it is a question of a territorial community accompanied by a feeling of collective identity that is projected through a desire for self-government. 3 The author is not using the word “imagined” as it is normally used in English. He means that they are created through acts of thought (translator). 4 I am using the idea of collectivity offered by Robert K. Merton, according to which a collectivity is a group of individuals who in spite of the absence of any interaction or close contact between them continue to feel a sense of solidarity (or of identification by projection) because they share certain values and because a feeling of moral obligation encourages them to meet, as they must, certain expectations linked to social roles (Giménez 2000, 53). 5 In Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire, Halbwachs (1925) defines and differentiates collective memory (or internal memory, constituted out of memories of a group) from historical memory (or external memory, which reunites and adds the memories in circulation up to the point of their unification). This type of memory appears generally when the living tradition of memory begins to diminish). 6 I am using the definition of nationalism offered by Smith: “an ideological movement that permits the formation and maintenance of autonomy, unity, and identity in the name of a population of people who, for some of its members, constitute a ‘real and potential nation’” (1999, 131). On the cultural and political dimension of nationalism, see Castiñeira (1998).
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7 Translators note: Here I have translated lieux de mémoire imperfectly as “places of memory”; part of the problem is that Castiñeira uses the word in two ways – sometimes in a metaphorical way (as we do in English) and sometimes to mean a literal space. 8 Nora (1984) distinguishes four different types of places of memory: 1 Spaces of symbolic importance that can host: commemorations, celebrations, pilgrimages, anniversaries, emblems, and so on 2 The locations of monuments: buildings, cemeteries, and the like 3 Topographical spaces: museums, archives, libraries, and so on 4 Functional spaces: manuals, autobiographies, associations, and the like. 9 Nogué 1998, 60–8) gives the following definitions for the terms “place,” “territory,” and “land”: place – “the portion of concrete space charged with symbolism that acts as a centre for the transmission of cultural messages”; territory – “a bounded space (by limits or by borders) with which a group of people identify, that they possess or covet, and that they aspire to control in its totality”; land – “Visible and perceptual part of space … projection of a society into a determined space [this usage of the word land owes much to the diverse meanings of the German word Land (trans.)]. In this sense, a land is full of spaces that incarnate the experience and the aspirations of these people. These are the sites that become centres of meaning, symbols that explain diverse thoughts, ideas, and emotions” (Nogué 1998, 60–8). 10 Another interesting commentary on the multiple and simultaneous reconstructions of the topography of Jerusalem by various traditions (Jewish, Islamic, and Christian) is given by Bettini ( 2001). 11 In the end, I stress the parallel between this and the strategies that permit the creation of national beliefs. Nora (1984), for example, compares the principal founders of the French Republic to a veritable civil religion, replete with its own Gods and the various other elements belonging to an era of necromania: the Pantheon, the hagiography, and a system of martyrs. 12 Cited by Nogué (1998); the italics are my own. 13 The War of Spanish Succession (1705–14) provoked the loss of Catalan rights and institutions, razed by the force of central power and the surrender of the city of Barcelona to the troops of the Bourbons. In 1716, Philip V of Bourbon signed a decree [the Decret de Nova Planta, which gave powers of government over Catalonia to the military (trans.)] eliminating the Catalan parliament, the autonomous government of Catalonia, and the Council of a Hundred. In the same year, Philip V ordered the
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construction of the largest citadel in Europe (the Ciutadella) in order to maintain order over the city. The university was closed and transferred to Cervera; in order to construct the Ciutadella, the neighbourhood of Ribera was destroyed. In 1716, construction began on the fortifications, with the costs supported by the city. In the middle of the nineteenth century, during the so-called Revolution of September, the Catalan general Joan Prim decided to return the Ciutadella to the city; it was ultimately destroyed between 1869 and 1888, and the only things remaining were the Governor’s Palace, the chapel, and the arsenal. In 1888, for the universal exposition that was being promoted by the mayor, Rius i Tualet, a park was constructed on the ruins of the Ciutadella. Dedicated to Rafael Casanova, the head councillor of the city of Barcelona, and to heroes of the city’s defence during the siege by the troops of Bourbon in 1714. Rememoration: an active search or effort to remember, an action of continuing remembrance. Commemoration: a type of rememoration of events or episodes from the past considered as constitutive (in some sense) and particularly important, based on the solemn (and patriotic) celebration of ceremonies that belong to a symbolic economy founded on the obligation to remember and that, through the bias of emotional mobilization, reinforces the sense of belonging to a community. Repetition: an organized reversion to historical dates in the calendar of commemorations. Stéphane Michonneau formulates four types of questions that he applies to the city of Barcelona at the end of the nineteenth century and that structure the study of commemorative societies: 1 Who are the entrepreneurs of the memory? Who are the promoters of memory that legitimately define the correct events to commemorate and the ones that would be better forgotten? What are their respective social positions? 2 What is the social value of commemoration? What does this obligation to remember signify from a social point of view? 3 What operative value does commemoration have as a social rite? 4 What are the relations between memory and space? Is it possible to draw a map of the memory projected into urban space (Michonneau 2002)?
19 For this reason, Emile Durkheim, as well as Renan, associates the nation more with a community of historical memories than with a cultural
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community – Switzerland, for example, can be considered a nation without it needing to share a cultural community (Durkheim 1975, 220–4; Llobera 2003b). In my opinion, Durkheim too easily commingles the existence of a cultural community with the existence of a distinct language. I would argue that historical memory, a symbolic system, is part of the national culture. Denise Jodelet defines the concept of social representation as a form of knowledge that is socially elaborated, shared, and oriented towards the practical and that contributes to the construction of a common reality of a social group. Social representations serve as a framework of perception and for the interpretation of reality, as well as a guide for behaviour and for the placement of social agents (Giménez 2000). Following Ricoeur, one could witness the creation of a sequential chain of memory that evolves from the imprint, to the sign, to the index, to the witnessing, to the evocative accounts, to the document, and to the monument (two of the elements that Nora considers as good examples of the places of memory). Following Anderson, one could say that what makes new communities imaginable (in a positive way) is “the more or less accidental (but explosive) encounter between a form of production and the relations of production (capitalism), a technology of communications (a mark) and the fatality of human linguistic diversity” that favours monoglotism (Anderson 1993, 63, and passim). Already referenced in Renan (2001). In his last book, W.G. Sebald presents a partially similar case for the German people. How is it possible to justify, he asks, the fact that the Germans have refused to speak of the damages provoked by the Allied bombings of Hamburg, Cologne, or Berlin (which entailed the complete destruction of these cities), as if, subdued by their desire to overcome the past, “we have become a people stunningly blind in the face of history” (2003, 8)? The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, led by the Archbishop Desmond Tutu, tried precisely to clear up and to make these traumatic and repressed memories conscious, with the hope that revealing the truth about the past would have a positive effect on the process of reconciliation. Margalit proposes that the Japanese community should do the same thing with regard to the group that has become known as the Comfort Women, the Korean women who were forced to become prostitutes during the Second World War. “Incorporating these women into a shared memory with Japan would signify giving them a new life by recognizing their suffering and would be a first step towards repentance” (2002, 70).
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It should not escape anyone that this narrative idea of collective memory is influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis, which affirms the human need to recount and to give a coherent meaning to our stories that are not expressed and the need to make them acceptable, to be able to give a voice to those who have been made mute (see Ricoeur 1985 and Rodríguez González 2003). For Freud, the pain of the repressed story, of the repressed memory, disappears with words. 25 “In Ulster in particular, a great deal of today’s tensions date back to the seventeenth century. After a new series of conflicts with Irish Catholics, the British encouraged the English and the Scottish to settle in North Ireland to tame the natives. The Catholic population has from then on detested the Protestant invaders, not only because they were Protestants, but also because they were foreigners with different customs and who enjoyed more privileges. At that time, as today, the frictions were social and religious” (Connor 1998, 48). With regard to the subject of the National Day of Catalonia, 11 September, the historian J.M. Ainaud de Lasarte writes that this date “was commemorated throughout history not as a celebration of defeat (the fall of Barcelona at the hands of the French and Castilian armies under Philip V), but as a day of celebration for a people who had liberties and institutions which they never renounced and that they always claimed as their own” (Busquets 2003). 26 [The full quote is, “The British never remember it, the Irish never forget it, the Russians never make it, and the Americans never learn from it” (trans.).] The Orange parades in Northern Ireland, which commemorate the defeat of the Catholics by William of Orange constitute an important proof of the provocation that confirms that national identities are held together by stories of defeat (Quebec, Northern Ireland, Catalonia) but also, obviously, by the stories of victory. 27 In order for a community to exist, it is necessary to forget not only the antimonies of the past but also (contrary to what Anderson says) the act of forgetting. The forgetting (the “obligation to forget”) implies a collective decision, but one out of memory; the forgetting of forgetting (of the “having forgotten”) is, on the other hand, a spontaneous mechanism under which a sense of identity is constructed. “It is this second act of forgetting that is offered as evidence for the existence of an authentic national subject” (Palti 2003, 77–8). Similarly, Michonneau argues that the “social act of memory implies necessarily a social act of forgetting. Forgetting is not necessarily the absence of memory; it is not a non-memory but ‘an inverted memory,’ a deconstruction of the inseparable memory of remembrance, like the front and the back of the same question” (2002, 104).
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28 “Quebec is a dream environment for a historian of memory. In this province, whose motto is the cult of remembrance, we find the panoply of historical determinations that condemn the threatened community to what the poet Paul Éluard calls the ‘strong desire to outlast.’ We find a priority attributed to history as a willingness to establish deep roots, as a continuity of the same thing, as a loyalty to the past … For you, memory is the expression of a conquest” (from Pierre Nora’s remarks on the occasion of her receiving a doctorate honoris causa, cited in Nora 1999, and Maclure 2003). 29 All the information and reactions related to this study by Dower are available on the website http://www.lclark.edu/~history/HIROSHIMA/dirc-hist. html [valid as of July 2005 (trans.)]. 30 One could extend this commentary to geographers and the topography of memory. Geographers study vital space (territory), the space where people live. A brilliant commentary on this theme is available in Josep Gifreu’s writings (Gifreu 2001). 31 Nevertheless, one of the most important functions of the historian and the media today is precisely that of examining important facts or episodes of the past at the national level. In Catalonia, for example, many documentaries or docu-dramas doing just that have recently been made and have enjoyed large audiences – for example, La memòria dels Cargols (written by Lluís Arcarazo and Francesc Orteu, among others, and directed by Dagoll Dagom), Historias de Cataluña (directed by Joan Gallifa and Antoni Tortajada), Tiempo de silencio (based on a story by Enric Gomà, produced and directed by Xavier Borrell), and the historical documentaries produced by Maria Dolors Genovès, like Sumarísimo 477 or Cambó. On this subject, the reader should consult the article “Les narraciones de la historia,” published in L’Avenç (DDAA 2003). I also want to highlight the documentary series (in 16 chapters), Dies de transició [referring to the transition period during the return to democracy (trans.)] directed by Francesc Escribano, currently being broadcast on Televisió de Catalunya, SA, as well as the collection of documentaries by Televisió de Catalunya, SA, that form the series La nostra memòria published by El Periódico de Catalunya (started 9 May 2004). The collection includes the following titles: “Els nens perduts del franquisme” (I and II), “El convoi dels 927,” “Operació Nikolai,” “Els últims morts de Franco,” “L’or de Moscou,” “El Born, un vincle amb el passat,” “Cuba, sempre fidelíssima,” and “Les fosses del silenci” (I and II). 32 An example of what I have discussed can be found in certain articles of the dossier published by the Revista de Occidente entitled “La Cataluña
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real” (DDAA 2001). The authors, having announced that all nationalisms invent their own nation (Miquel Porta Perales) or present an arbitrary vision (Antoni Puiverd), argue that in Catalonia the intellectuals of the Renaixença and their heirs constructed an ideal Catalonia and attempted to present it as the authentic “true Catalonia,” a non-invented Catalonia. Worse still, shortly after they did so, Porta Perales actually wrote (2003) that Spain is not an artificial political entity (Porta Perales 2003). As Ferran Sàez argued, “to deconstruct is generally a hygienic action from a conceptual point of view. However, to deconstruct à la carte, ad hoc, is proof of intellectual frivolity and a lack of honesty” (2003, 180). All things considered, there is nothing more arbitrary from a conceptual point of view than to consider national identities as ficticious, while considering state nationalities as non-fictional. Initially, it would appear that the invented nature of each collective attribution is valuable only in certain cases. This type of situation has also been explained by the phenomenon that some have called “the transparent nature of accomplished nationalism” (Defez 2003, 296), according to which the members of a hegemonic nationalism or of a nationalism instituted by the state identify (or disqualify) as nationalists only those who belong to an emergent nationalism but who are not considered as such. For example, José M. Aznar said, “I am not a Spanish nationalist. I am simply a Spaniard by conviction!” (Le Monde, 10 February 1999). 33 In his study of collective memory in Christianity, Halbwachs (1941) demonstrates how, throughout different historical periods, the importance attributed to certain sacred places changed according to the hopes and needs of the various Christian groups describing the places. 34 “In 1998, twenty years after the constitution, we, the Spanish people, realized that we had carried out a huge national political project, the project of the modernization and the Europeanization of Spain ... For a generation like mine, which had grown up with the heavy memory of Spain’s unique history, which had undergone no period of bourgeois revolution, which had experience no Industrial Revolution, which had not joined modern science, which had no employers, which had been incapable of establishing a capitalist or democratic economy, it was a moment of relief to realize that this had all disappeared. The Pyrenees were no longer a border and we no longer had reason to feel ashamed. We were normal” (Lamo de Espinosa 2001, 177–84; Guibernau (2000) also refers to this). For Emilio Lamo de Espinosa, the real representation of this project was the PSOE [the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (trans.)] victory in 1982, led by “a young generation of Spaniards who would soon be considered nationalists and
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the leaders of a project to transform the nation that was based on three simple ideas: to change (rather than to conserve), to modernize (rather than to traditionalize), and to look outward to Europe (rather than to look inward to Spain)” (178). 35 Other authors follow this line of investigation. Daniel Bell speaks of hedonism, Christopher Lasch of narcissism, and Allan Bloom of egocentrism, while Michel Foucault speaks of the aesthetisation of the self, and Gilles Lipovetsky tries to describe the current forms of post-modern individualism.
4 Cultural Diversity and Modernity: The Conditions of the Vivre Ensemble Louis Dupont “Where am I?” That certainly seems to be a trivial question. After all, every one of us can find, on a map or on our GPS, where we stand, where we want to go, and how we get there. But that is obviously not the question being asked here. “Where am I?” questions what might be called the sensitive space, as when a “voyageur” or an explorer finds him- or herself in an unfamiliar place or in a space that is no longer understood. The “voyageur” wants to make sense of where he or she is and thus looks for answers in trying to identify and eventually decipher significant cultural and social markers. When asked instinctively, the question reveals the nature of our relations to space and to the world.1 It expresses a need to feel reassured, as well as a desire to know this world that both unsettles me and awakens my curiosity. For Kant (1999), space is a necessary a priori representation that serves, with time, as the foundation of all our external intuitions. He proposes that, while we can imagine a vacuum, it is impossible to imagine a thing without space. In the same way, we can say that it is impossible to move adequately within a world without taking into account its sensitive or cultural space. There is no need to explain this to an immigrant. As a geographer, I see a methodological point of departure from which the exploration and analysis of the world should begin. Indeed, one cannot understand the world without also having an interest in how things acquire meaning and take on different significations. Consider first multiculturalism. In reality, multiculturalism does not exist anywhere on the planet, but it certainly is one way among others to give meaning to the existing cultural plurality that can be observed in almost all regions of the globe. We could say, for
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example, that Canada is actually no more multicultural a country than any other, but in 1971 the majority chose to give a different name to what until then had been called “cultural diversity.”2 Multiculturalism was then politically and legally enshrined and became the cornerstone of a new post-British “national identity” and the official state discourse of Canada. In the United States, multiculturalism takes on another meaning: it is the dominant discourse of the left, used to fight against the discrimination that some American citizens are subject to because of cultural, racial, or sexual difference. In France, the word and its connotations are generally despised in political and academic circles. “Where am I?” questions those fields of signification where social and cultural processes interact to produce and to structure meaning (le sens). In the following pages, my objective is to demonstrate how a geographic way of seeing and thinking can help us understand cultural pluralism in the context of modern societies (and nations). In the first part, I discuss the problematic of an essentialist conception of places and people. Instead of conceptualizing limits as the “up to there” of the substance, I propose to consider them as the components that structure essence. In the second part, referring to this conception of limits and essence, I look at three types of compositions of the vivre ensemble (living together) in the modern context of specific nations. Here I focus on the role of the majority. Finally, I present the conditions that preside over the (re)composition of the vivre ensemble in culturally diverse societies in the context of advanced modernity.
Thinking about Modern Society The notion of vivre ensemble and the idea of a majority and/or dominant group are modern categories. The vivre ensemble is a social and cultural composition; it is a sort of compromise or, to be more precise, a modus vivendi for individuals and cultural groups that share the same portion of the Earth. A dominant group implies that there is also a dominated group; we can imagine that their vivre ensemble holds as long as the power structure does not change. Civil war, rebellion, and upheaval can cause change for the dominated group. Things may also change slowly and more or less peacefully. What is striking in the modern world is that changes are thought of and realized in reference to the modern horizon of universal values,
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generally embedded in a constitution. Like it or not, it is a ”horizon” for human beings. The line of horizon is drawn by real societies or effective nations; it is for many people an expression of their vivre ensemble. This line is the result of a tension between what makes a person an individual and a unique but universal being and what makes a person a cultural being or a man or woman with particular values and qualities. In order to explore the vivre ensemble and the role a majority group plays in its composition, I advance an analytical model defined in terms of the tensions between the spaces that structure modern society. Space and Essence Geography and other social sciences have had a strong tendency to answer the question “Where am I?” by “essentializing” its categories of analysis (regions and groups). However, the roots of essentialist thought go deeper than current social sciences. Essentialist thought originates in Western civilization with Aristotle, for whom Man and the topos (translated as “place”) are from the beginning separated and irreducible; Man, the substantial Being with a pre-established identity, is conceptualized apart from the accidental places that provide him with an appearance. Two general approaches in the social sciences have replicated this conception of the relation between Man and place. Following the first approach, I begin by discussing substance (the pure, real, true, authentic, absolute essence): it is this and not that and it stops being this beyond that point. I then turn to the accidental places where the substantial Being can be found in order to determine the extent to which He conforms to his defined nature or essence. In cultural analysis, this approach would generally mean defining a collective identity and then looking into the historic and geographic reality of its various appearances. Incidentally, I may find that visible reality fails to conform adequately with the defined essence: such inadequacies could be classified on a set scale. I might also end up excluding some cases or presenting them as accidental. If I say, for example; “this is really Canadian,” I am implying that at a certain point something can stop being Canadian and can become “un-Canadian.” Likewise, as much as some places would seem to be typically Canadian, others might appear to be less representative of Canada. In the second approach, I focus at first on appearances, from which I try to induce essence. From there, I may limit the substance
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to what is observed: they are what I see. Otherwise, I may look on the appearances in relation to an idealized essence: they are this but should be that.3 In all scenarios, thinking in terms of essence fixes us in endless entrapping discussions. Essences falsify the judgment and the exercise of reason. Instead of analysing, we find ourselves engaged in the process of “scientifically” justifying a previously held position. Thinking in terms of essence condemns us to engage in debates that make us lose sight of the role played by individuals and groups in the construction of their substance or identity through their social transactions (Martieniello 1997; Werlen 2003). Can we escape the essentialist trap? Essence and Limits It is not necessary to resort to philosophy to realize the difficulties we have in not thinking of places and groups in terms of essence. The fault does not lie with Aristotle and his followers. It is a common daily affair. Whether through cause or effect, words and language already confine us: “Irishmen are,” “Normandy is,” “Women are.” Human beings cannot escape the need to live in a meaningful and orderly world (or at least in one with an ordering principle). In short, the world has to make sense; it must be cosmos, not chaos. Even when it seems that nothing is there, you can count on a person’s imagination to provide emptiness with meaning. As a consequence, it is almost impossible for all of us to escape the “essentializing” process. However, it is possible to avoid the trapping effect by turning our attention to the structuring role of limits. Limits reveal the essence; furthermore, essences are constructed out of a sense of or the knowledge of limits (chosen or imposed). For example, most of us would agree that contemporary Germans are pacifists: they refuse to engage in a war but remain ready to go on peace missions. This appears to be their new essence. Were they previously warlike in essence? Were they accidentally warlike? Have they now found their “true” nature? As we can see, thinking in terms of essence leads us to an impasse. In fact, after 1945 Germans chose to “limit” their society: no more war. They have since acted accordingly and have thus slowly constructed a pacifist essence. In everyday life, the experience of limits constantly reveals to me the essences of places and people; limits put choices before the individual. Suppose that I was invited to a prestigious place where formal attire was required. I would presume that there were several
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rules of conduct out of a field of possibilities: rules based on taste, style, and means as well as rules that I would need to follow in order to meet those requirements. But if I chose to appear in torn jeans and t-shirt, I would certainly be “out of place.” If there was a bouncer (the equivalent of the law), I might be refused entry. On the other hand, if I was allowed in, people who were “in place” – the ones who chose to follow the dress code – could make me feel that my attire was incorrect (not the norm) and that I was “out of place.”4 That I might have dressed this way as a form of protest would not make the slightest difference. In crossing the limits, I have challenged what those limits signify. Such experiences are typical in all sectors of social life. We go from place to place and into groups and organisations that are bounded and well defined. The practices of a society make us aware of and lead us to understand these limits. Sometimes we respect them either instinctively or deliberately and sometimes we unknowingly break them. Limits, Essence, and Modernity When considering a system as open as the modern world, is it conceivable to think in terms of limits? In reality, modernity is an open system because its space of projection has no set limits, while in its spaces of realization limits have been constantly imposed, broken, or pushed away. Let us consider equality, a universal value that projects a horizon upon humanity. While equality has no set limits as a horizon, modern societies have had to restrict the effect it has in their space of realization. Although universal in principle, the right to vote was originally reserved in France and the United States to a small group of landowning and entitled “enlightened citizens.” Suffrage was then extended to all men aged thirty and over (then reduced to twenty-five, twentyone, and eighteen); some people would now like to reduce the voting age to sixteen. Not without difficulty, the right to vote was gradually gained by women, Blacks, Jews, Native Americans, and other disenfranchised groups. Certain ecologists speak today, one hopes metaphorically, about giving the right to vote to trees and animals … This example shows that there are two types of limits. The first is equivalent to the line of horizon. Indeed, when we look far away, there is always a line that separates where I am (the space of realization) from a “beyond” where I can project myself (the space of projection). The horizon reveals, in modernity, a tension between universalism
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and the values of a particular society. The second type of limit is to be found in the space of realization. These limits reveal the existence of a tension between the sensitive (or cultural) space and the citizen space, that is to say, a tension between identity and citizenship. “Vivre Ensemble” and the Concept of Nation To many observers, notably those in the Anglosphere, the modern nation is today considered unfit to preside over the composition of a vivre ensemble in a pluricultural (or multicultural) society. However valid, this criticism fails to distinguish between the general concept of the nation, which provides the parameters of the vivre ensemble, and specific nations, which for multiple reasons were incapable of pushing their arbitrary limits in the space of realization.5 The nation was historically seen as the ideal form of organisation to provide sense and order to modern societies. On what terms? The first function of any society consists in constraining human beings’ darker impulses in order to fulfil two fundamental missions: to prevent their self-destruction and to prevent their destruction by others. This constraint will, ostensibly, guarantee social cohesion and safety from the outside and foster social harmony and peace with others. It is thus necessary to diffuse a sense of vivre ensemble within modern society and to see that inhabitants living within a set territory agree to place the common good over their particular interests. The general interest that ensues from the common good is at the origin of the citizen space. It is different but inseparable from the field of values and identity (the sensitive space). In sum, a nation is always civic and cultural and there is always tension between the cultural and civic components of each nation. What, then, is the “vivre ensemble”? It is a way of overcoming the tension between citizenship and identity in the space of realization of a nation and in connection with the space of projection opened by the horizon of universal values.6 The vivre ensemble is a social composition expressing itself around the idea that shared values are necessary for the emergence, in the space of realization, of a general interest without which the functioning of a modern democratic society is impossible. Among all its known permutations, there is a single constant: the existence of a dynamic initiated by a group in a majority or dominant situation. In what follows, I suggest revisiting these permutations by focusing on (1) the tensions between the horizon of universal
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values and the space of realization of national cultures and (2) the tensions between the sensitive space and the citizen space through which identity and citizenship must be reconciled.
General Permutations Nation and “Nationalities”7 Modernity emerged historically in Europe in the sensitive spaces of territorialized cultures with a well-defined horizon. Throughout the Middle Ages, the European space of projection oscillated between the promises of Heaven and the search for a lost earthly paradise.8 Traditional cultures, imbued with Christianity, had already been more or less altered by the process of modernization that preceded the advent of modernity. Indeed, modernity and modernization constitute two different processes that are, in theory, always associated but, in practice, are not necessarily concomitant. Modernity stems from a conception of humanity based on a value system at the heart of which we find reason. Modernization is the use of reason, through science and technology, to transform the material world. Well before modern European thinkers began to attack the medieval order, European societies were engaged, as Braudel has shown (1985), in a slow but steady process of modernization through the evolution of techniques and modes of production and the development of the market.9 Modernity was set to upset the traditional world by proposing a new space of projection for humanity. In doing so, it disrupted the traditional vivre ensemble by offering the individual the possibility of freeing himself or herself from the influence and arbitrary power of culture. This process of liberation did not, however, free human beings from the need to revive or recreate significant and orderly worlds. Instead, social reorganization was too focused on the idea of the “nation.” From Napoleon to the Great War, for better or worse, the dominant tendency in Europe was to try to equate a territory with a “nationality.” This led to the emergence of a general normative preference for a unique or dominant “nationality” and entailed the assumption that nationalities had the capacity to anchor a stable society within a modern “horizon.” Thus the citizen space was closely connected with (and even defined by) the dominant culturally homogeneous group. Within a national framework, the dominant culture became the national culture and citizenship tended to
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depend on cultural identity to the point that, in most languages, nationality and citizenship became interchangeable. As a result, cultural minorities were forced to assimilate or to negotiate an agreement, legal or tacit, that generally translated into geographic seclusion and limited access to the citizen space.10 In the worst of cases, nationalism was used to limit the exercise of citizenship for individuals not belonging to the majority or dominant group. In sum, the space of projection of modernity was reduced to that of the dominant group. Nation and Universality The second type of permutation concerns France and the United States, the two polities that were originally associated with the ideal of the modern nation. In France, no dominant ethnic group was present before the emergence of the French nation. In the United States, however, a dominant English Protestant group, forming the majority, was the founder of the American Nation. In France, the Revolution, which found its final expression in the republican state, spanned more than a hundred years and sometimes entailed repression in order to realize the merger of the local territorialized cultures (Normande, Bretonne, Vandéenne, Alsacienne, etc.). The fusion of different cultures was the foundation of la culture nationale, which would assimilate waves of Christian and European immigrants of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and Polish origin. This national republican culture explicitly connected itself to the modern horizon and to universal values. In the United States, the founding WASP group took a similar length of time to assimilate the European immigrants who constituted the great majority of newcomers in the nineteenth century. Territorialized Amerindian cultures were eliminated or repelled. In these two countries, the horizon of the universal rights and the ideals of modernity were the engine of the nation, to such a degree that, in each case, they defined themselves in reference to this horizon. In the nineteenth-century, la Grande Nation proclaimed itself the homeland of human rights (la patrie des droits de l’Homme); the citizen space was said to be open to every person based on his or her characteristics as a human being. The famous sentence “give nothing to the Jews as Jews, but everything to the Jews as citizens” illustrates the universal reach of the French nation. The “Great Society” now surpasses France in this claim: universal values such as freedom and
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equality are espoused as American values in presidential speeches. In these two republics, assimilation was the only conceivable option. In France, assimilation was achieved through compulsory education and an all-powerful normative system elaborated around the prestige of the French language and the power of the state, the guarantor of the common interest. In the United States, assimilation was achieved in cities through integration into the market, where the faster one mastered the English language and the basic American cultural codes, the greater were one’s chances of success.11 Contrary to what happened in France, the American state never really put into place a system facilitating or forcing assimilation. Assimilation evolved, so to speak, by necessity. Nevertheless, despite the ideal inspired by the general concept of nation, these specific nations had to fashion themselves in their space of realization within normative and legal limits that decreased or blocked certain individuals’ access to the citizen space. After its defeat against Prussia and Bismarck in 1871, la Grande Nation was humbled and began a process of revising its national culture based on the works of historians and geographers. It then reverted to the cultures the Republic had attempted to crush.12 Devoid of their most important differences (above all language), these cultures developed regional differences refracting novel variations of the national culture. A horizon now distinguished the national culture’s space of realization from the universal scope of the nation and, as a consequence, new tensions between the citizen space and the sensitive space emerged. The French national culture now has greater difficulty integrating, not to mention assimilating, immigrants and the children of immigrants whose cultural and racial profiles do not quite fit the national norm. As a consequence, cultural forces have intervened, curtailing full access to the citizen space. Discrimination in the marketplace is the most obvious effect. In many respects, the exclusive character of the national culture is sometimes similar to that of homogeneous nations. The French, because they privilege the national culture or because they continue to believe in the ideal of the nation, have some difficulty conceiving that the normative system of the national culture limits access to the citizen space. The French state continues to think and to act according to an assimilationist project and promises of universal values. Cultural differences belong in the private sphere. As opposed to Canada or the United States, specific cultural groups fighting against discrimination in the citizen space find no mercy in the
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eyes of the majority. Can the normative system of the national culture change or has it reached its limit? Whatever the answer, we must now take into account the fact that the French state is no longer the only institution responsible for the actualization of common interest and for the enshrinement of the citizen space; this responsibility is now shared between the state and European institutions. In the United States, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the federal state officially adopted the idea of the melting pot as the cornerstone of the nation’s cultural identity. It did so at the very moment that the cultural differences of European immigrants had disappeared or had become insignificant. The history of the United States in the nineteenth century was marred by constant tensions and confrontations between groups of immigrants and the English Protestant majority. In spite of the horizon outlined by the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, this dominant group had kept its grip on the citizen space and exercised its power over the sensitive space. With the exception of Catholics in Maryland during the colonial period, the British and Protestant Founding Fathers failed to imagine something other than a nation where citizenship would be exclusively reserved for the descendants of the colonists and for British and Protestant immigrants. During the nineteenth century, the question of cultural difference was moot. Catholic Irish and French Canadians were among the first cultural groups to experience the limits of a nation defined by and for the Protestant majority. In fact, it was not until 1960 and the election of John F. Kennedy that doubts about Catholic citizens disappeared more or less completely in the minds of the majority of voters. Kennedy would, nonetheless, be forced to make a speech asserting that he would manage the nation with regard to the general interest and not with regard to the wishes of the Pope. Subsequently the cultural differences of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe continued to conflict with the limits imposed by the majority’s normative system. These cultural tensions and the universal horizon of the Great Society would radically transform the Anglo-Protestant-centered conception of the nation. With the affirmation of the melting pot, the federal government celebrated the advent of a national culture resulting from the fusion of European cultural differences. Race, the ultimate limit of the melting pot, revealed the latter’s essence: the official national identity was no longer English Protestant but white, Christian, European, and English-speaking. In the space
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of realization, racial exclusion placed the dominant national culture in a de facto majority/minorities relationship. Until the middle of the twentieth century, and despite the appearances of universal values, African Americans, Amerindians, and Asians (Chinese) lived at the geographic and cultural periphery of the majority. The civil rights movement took aim at this exclusion, leaning equally on the majority’s normative system, law, repression, and restricted access to the citizen space. As its name indicates, the objective of the movement was not, at least originally, to ensure the recognition of cultural (racial) difference but instead to create access to the citizen space for the all Americans of African origin. The movement followed tangents embodied by two charismatic leaders: Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. The paths they followed are rich in lessons about the relationship between the sensitive space and citizen spaces and demonstrate that the concept of cultural difference took on two totally different meanings and functions. King built a modern discourse around the claim for equality and the fight against discrimination in the citizen space; it rested on a Christian mythology in tune with the American normative system. In form as well as in content, none of what he said was foreign to the majority of American citizens. He wanted equality for all and demanded that all Americans be judged on their merits and not on the colour of their skin. King asked for nothing more than the application, in the space of realization, of the promises of the modern horizon – not only in the South, where a law of apartheid was in effect, but also across the entirety of American society. Unlike France or Quebec, the American legal system has no official civil code. Civil rights were gradually added to the constitution (which originally contained none). The situation in the United States in 1960 exemplifies the central contradiction of a liberal society: the universal rights of the abstract individual and their application in the space of realization. For instance, the right to private property gave an individual the right to legally refuse a hotel room (a famous civil rights case scenario) or an apartment to an African American. In the absence of civil rights, the arbitrary power of majority’s social and cultural norms was the ultimate arbiter in the space of realization. The sensitive space took over the citizen space. King asked the federal state to act in accordance with the common interest and not with the majority’s interest by dismantling apartheid in Southern states and by adopting a series of civil rights that would thwart the
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excesses of the majority’s normative system. In sum, civil rights were necessary to provide African Americans with the necessary means to fully access the citizen space. Malcolm X doubted that the dominant culture could change: he did not believe that the state or its majority could protect a “citizen of colour” and provide him or her with the right to equality and freedom. In a memorable speech, “The Ballot or the Bullet,” Malcolm X suggested to African Americans that they take their fate in their own hands and counterbalance the power of the dominant group in order to force the state to assure them of their right to fully exercise their citizenship. He addressed the right to vote and, more precisely, the difficulties faced by African Americans trying to exercise this right. In 1960, even if African Americans had the right to vote, the majority used many forms of subterfuge (legal and repressive) to prevent them from voting. Registrations on the elector’s list were, for example, located in white districts where African Americans were forbidden to go. If they ventured into these areas, they risked being physically threatened, beaten, or even killed. Malcolm X demanded that the state protect its citizens of colour in the exercise of their rights. If the state did not do so, African Americans would have to take care of the problem themselves: free and secure access to the ballot or else guns to protect that right. Because of his determination to confront the majority, both rhetorically and in reality if necessary, Malcolm X frightened the dominant white majority. But in all respects – thought, discourse, action – he was as American as King. In advocating that African Americans stand up for their rights and that they (if necessary) fight for them, the discourse of the leader of the Nation of Islam was inspired by the revolutionary spirit at the origin of the republic, as well as by the Declaration of Independence. His thoughts and vision were inspired by a sound understanding of the country’s history. He had learned that immigrants of all origins (except for WASPs) had, on their way to integration and assimilation, been faced with the limits imposed by the majority and that this had often entailed violent confrontations. Well versed in colonial history, he also understood that a dominant power or group does not, by itself, become benevolent and generous and that, for the dominant group, compromise is good and possible as long as it does not change the existing power structure. In American cities, ethnic districts provided the immigrants with relative cultural and personal security. Immigrants found a familiar
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environment where they could adapt and where they could learn the language and customs of American society. From there, immigrants, and especially their children, could move into the mainstream and leave their cultural ghetto. This process had eluded African Americans; their “ghetto” was a dead end and not a means to “move on.” Consequently the Nation of Islam’s social project entailed strengthening black communities, allowing them to grow richer by taking back businesses. It was thus necessary to cultivate cultural (racial) differences; a novel approach for Americans! Glazer (1997) contends that the American multicultural ideal is rooted in the failure of American society to address the challenge of race and the concomitant valorization of racial differences. The country thus moved from the valorization of cultural origins to the praise of cultural differences. This led to, especially during the period of protest against the Vietnam War, the valorization of the cultural heritages of individuals who had long been assimilated into the dominant culture and of new immigrants (generally not of European extraction) who asserted their differences in order to fight against discrimination. Nation and Majority In addition to France and the United States, Great Britain was the other modern nation where the vivre ensemble was defined by and around the dominant majority group. Here it was synonymous with the English. In the territory of what was called the British Isles, which included Great Britain and Ireland, the English realized their territorial supremacy by annexing and partially merging three minority nationalities (nationalités). They concluded an alliance with the Scottish: Scottish traders relinquished their Crown to the English so that they could take their place at the heart of the Empire. England then imposed itself on the Irish, who, though resisting politically, succumbed to the attraction of the dominant English culture, primarily by adopting the language of the conqueror. The Welsh gradually merged with the English group and now preserve only some innocuous cultural features. Unlike the French, the English never cared to elaborate mechanisms for assimilating these cultures; the power of the Empire and its profits were sufficient mechanisms to engender integration and assimilation. Similarly, the British vivre ensemble did not require immigrants coming from the colonies to become English (in the cultural sense of the term), but it did and still
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does require them to integrate adequately into the hierarchical social system and into the market. Immigrants are invited to invent an ethnic culture and to live as a satellite orbiting the dominant English planet, which, if the rules of the game are respected, will tolerate their differences and provide them with full access to the citizen space. In the British space of realization, anyone can hope to be a British citizen. However not everyone should dream of becoming British. This means that as long as the status of the majority group is unquestioned, “the other,” with its cultural differences, gains complete access to the citizen space. The system rests on co-opting elites of every minority group; a minority within the minority that acquires the privilege of becoming English and that serves as a link between the majority and the ethnic groups. The universality of English culture commands imitation, not fusion. This does not stop the majority’s normative system from discriminating against difference, but it certainly holds it in check. In the sensitive space, the English planet is at the centre of the British universe: the merged nationalities orbit closely around the centre while the ethnic cultures orbit farther away. The recent political reorganization of the United Kingdom reflects this cultural configuration. It is interesting to note that the British government recently created three regional parliaments while there are now four “regions” or nationalities. It appears that the English majority controlling the “national” parliament does not need any regional institution of its own. However, some English citizens have recently asked that Scottish deputies refrain from voting on issues that fall under the jurisdiction of the Scottish parliament. Evidencing the dominant paradigm in the Anglosphere, former Prime Minister Tony Blair spoke about British society as a multicultural society. He was probably right if he meant that there are great cultural differences in the United Kingdom and that, in consequence, discrimination (especially in the marketplace) should be fought. Multiculturalism has also produced increased tensions in Great Britain between the majority’s normative system and the Other’s normative system. More numerous than ever, minority cultural groups now challenge cultural and political power structures. As a consequence, the legendary tolerance of the English people is being tested, especially in poorer regions, where personal difficulties are explained by the increased presence and cultural visibility of the Others. This has led to recurring eruptions of urban violence.
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What can be said about these three permutations of the vivre ensemble? First, they are not fundamentally different. In each case, a dominant majority group or a national culture presided over the composition of the vivre ensemble. The social ladder was formed out of the tension between the modern space of projection and the space of realization, at the centre of which we find historically, a dominant group (the United States, Great Britain), a national culture (France), or an ethno-national culture (Europe). Also, tensions appeared in the space of realization between the sensitive space, dominated by the majority group, and the citizen space, bound by the modern version of universal values. In each case, limits were imposed by the majority group: its normative system dominated the sensitive space and tended to control the legal system. Second, if we were to extend our analysis to other societies, we would find considerable differences in the means and the possibilities for managing the tensions between the spaces that structure modern society. In using “means,” I refer mostly to political will and economic conditions; using “possibilities,” I refer to a society’s capacity to invent ways of living together (for individuals and for cultural groups) within and beyond its known limits. In a set period in its history, each society has at its disposal a field of means and a field of possibilities for creating or dismantling limits.
The Vivre Ensemble and Cultural Plurality in Advanced Modernity In the second half of the twentieth century, modern Western societies underwent profound transformations that forced them to revise how they framed their respective vivre ensemble. One major factor of change has been the arrival of immigrants from non-Western countries, immigrants of non-European and non-Christian origins (who are also often non-White). As a result, the vivre ensemble must be reconstituted on the basis of a new arrangement between the sensitive space and the citizen space. In this regard, multiculturalism has emerged as the new paradigm. Four years ago I participated in a collective work with some American colleagues: Global Multiculturalism: Perspectives on Ethnicity, Race, and Nation (Cornwell and Stoddard 2001). Contributors to this book explore the state of multiculturalism in eight countries on five continents and focus on “how tensions play out between the state and
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the diverse ethnic, racial, or cultural groups that make it up” (ix). The dominant idea is that cultural and territorial borders are arbitrary, that hybridism, or métissage, is everywhere and that, throughout most the world, multiculturalism is standard: “‘Multiculturedness’ is not exclusive to the United States, nor is multiculturalism the ‘handmaiden’ of American identity politics. Virtually all countries and regions are multicultural” (1). Multiculturalism can thus be seen as a way of thinking about the world: “it can be applied as a heuristic device and as a focus of comparison for most countries ... The term ‘multicultural’ rather than ‘multiethnic’ or ‘multiracial’ has assets and liabilities, but it has gained currency in North America and is being appropriated around the world” (2). These statements surprised me. Between 1990 and 1995, I had been part of the research and discussion group that was at the origin of the work. Five years later, writing my chapter in France, I suddenly had the impression that I had lived on two planets, at the same time similar and yet very different. American liberal arts institutions had moved away from the seemingly inescapable intellectual mantra of “class, gender, race and ethnicity” to something more along the line of “global ideas for a global society”! Multiculturalism would constitute the reality of all countries and regions of the world; multiculturalist discourse would be suitable for explaining the complexity of the world. I see an enormous epistemological problem with these assertions: was the world multicultural before the multiculturalist discourse emerged as the dominant explanatory paradigm?13 Or has it become multicultural under the auspices of multiculturalism? Fairly recently, we saw Prime Minister Tony Blair and Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder officially referring to their respective societies as “multicultural.” What they meant by this term, however, is unclear. It appears to mean that, above all, their society has become increasingly pluricultural and that the majority, or the dominant, national culture must deal with this fact. Their statements are not actually very different from those of other countries such as Canada, the United States, and Australia, where multiculturalism is a statement of fact and a political way of thinking and dealing with increased cultural diversity. Even though multiculturalism means different things for those societies, in each of them it remains the majority’s solution to the problem of reframing the vivre ensemble. It also includes in the space of realization a challenge to the normative system of the
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majority and / or dominant group. As such, “multiculturalism” does not differ much from “nation”: it forces specific nations to rethink the identity / citizenship relationship. The biggest change is that the majority has to negotiate; cultural transactions have to be made. What must be negotiated? Three things: the common interest, the right to difference / indifference, and social harmony (or the order / disorder relation). The General Interest Pluricultural societies face a particular task: they must generate a common interest rooted in values shared by all. However, the negotiation here takes place not only between citizens sharing similar cultural horizons but also includes cultural groups themselves. In the sensitive space, the majority group has to take into account the fact that the normative system that it used to impose, if only by virtue of its numbers or through its domination of the national culture, can limit the Other’s access to the citizen space. In return, limits on the particular demands of cultural groups must also be set. In modern societies these limits are minimal: freedom, equality, and the use of law stemming from the democratic process and from representative government. They are non-negotiable. Certain cultural characteristics of the majority can also appear to be non-negotiable because they ensure social stability and balance. Such is often the case with language. Although Australians define themselves as multicultural, Australia imposes English as the official language of communication (this is also the case in Germany and, more recently, Netherlands). In Canada, a contested “national” compromise between the two historical founding groups has forced the majority to adopt official bilingualism (French and English). In the United States, the pluricultural society has not changed and the national mantra since President Lincoln – “Whatever are our differences, there are more things binding us together, than there are things that separate us” – is still the founding discourse of the nation. It is repeated, president after president, despite the continuing debate on American identity, from the melting pot, to multiculturalism, to the Salad Bowl, etc. The idea is simple and universal in scope. It implies that, however one conceives of cultural differences, all forms of cultural difference are, at least in principle, acceptable and respectable; they are ultimately less important than
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the common interest. In other words, they cannot trump common values and the common interest. While the American mantra appears to be universal in scope, it is nonetheless context-specific. It reduces the understanding of the political problems resulting from differences and overlooks territorialized cultures which do not exist in the United States. In this form of negotiation, the majority group rarely discusses its identity and, consequently, tends to see itself as the bearer of shared national values. The Other tends to be seen through its difference and is even locked into his or her difference. The Right to In-Difference The droit à la difference (the right to be different), about which so much is said nowadays, is not, strictly speaking, a right. It is a demand for respect, as well as the cultural basis for political struggle against the social discrimination that some face because of their cultural, racial, linguistic, and sexual non-normative characteristics. From this perspective, the right to be different is more a means than an end: its logical outcome would be the right to “in-difference,” or to “no-difference,” if we want to avoid the negative sense of the word indifference. Without the right to indifference, the right to (cultural) difference locks the Other in an essence that reduces him or her to his or her group. The right to indifference, on the other hand, provides every individual with the possibility of being considered simply as a citizen. The right to indifference enshrines the freedom and equality of the human person beyond his/her difference, allowing him/her to embrace open brotherhood/sisterhood without prejudice (Dumont 2002). The right to indifference restores the balance between identity and citizenship, notably in societies where the vivre ensemble has to be formed within cultural diversity. An individual is free to adhere or not to the “we” of his or her choice. But can an individual choose not to belong to any “we”? In a social system where the right to be different is the basis for political battles, does the individual without a known, pre-defined essence become a social eccentric? Without the possibility of being treated indifferently, cultural difference can be a form of confinement, an essence from which the individual will want to free himself or herself, unless it becomes a refuge and a pretext for personal irresponsibility. The plural character of any authentic identity forces
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us to refuse to be locked into a unique representation; an identity finds its balance only in a plurality of representations. Order and Disorder The reframing of the vivre ensemble must also balance social harmony. It would be futile to claim the right to be different and the right to respect and tolerance for all differences if the conditions that marginalized Others remained unchanged. Most effective nations exist because a dominant group or the majority was able to impose a social order, that is, an arrangement capable of maintaining order within a given territory: they imposed a compulsory limit that was normative, constitutional, and perhaps even repressive in nature. In an effective nation, free men and women do not easily accept that a limit exists unless it has been negotiated beforehand. Federalism, for instance, offers the possibility of maintaining various permutations of the vivre ensemble in the same political space. It requires an obligation to negotiate the conditions of the coexistence, which reproduce the power structure that created tensions in the first place. The excesses of nationalism and the limits placed on the citizen space by specific nations do not invalidate the overarching concept of the nation. However cultural pluralism does pose a challenge to the idea of a nation and to the existence of specific nations. Nations came into being because a majority or dominant group was able to impose order and a sense of the common interest. Assimilation was generally the norm. When they were not eliminated, cultural differences were either tolerated or valued on the condition that they be reduced to benign features. In advanced modernity, the majority/ dominant group finds itself in a different situation: it can no longer impose its norms and order but must also negotiate with Others to create a new vivre ensemble. In conclusion, I worry about the current situation in countries in Central and Eastern Europe, and in the former Soviet Union. Although they are sovereign in the modern sense of the term, these countries have had to frame a vivre ensemble by strengthening a nation around a majority or a dominant nationality, all the while responding to international requirements regarding the protection of minorities and the right to cultural difference. Furthermore, their economic situation is far from good. Faced with similar conditions, it would have been impossible for many of today’s nations to come into existence!
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notes 1 Humanity’s relation to space is at the heart of the human condition, owing to what Maurice Merleau-Ponty called corporéité (coporeity). My body is located somewhere and its limit puts me at a distance from the world; it is through my body that I enter into interaction with the world and with Others. The links between philosophical thought, most notably phenomenology and existentialism, and geography have been the object of particular attention by geographers associated with humanistic geography. See Casey (1979) and Berque (1996). 2 In Montreal’s world fair, Expo 67, Canada’s official motto was still “Unity and Diversity.” 3 This second approach and the two opposite directions it takes are like two scorpions in a bottle. In the first we find the typical colonial reaction to the state of being of the colonized; in the second, we see the traditional reaction that serves to boost political resistance and upheavals against the dominant group. 4 See Creswell (1996). 5 See Penrose (1994). I wrote one of the three critiques, published in the same issue. Penrose defended the idea that the failures of effective nations invalidated the general concept of nation; I think they do not. 6 In liberal post-colonial discussions, the very idea of universal values is under question. The commentators may have a point: universal values will always be contingent on a vision of humanity. I would say, however, that whatever they are, the most important thing is the horizon they open for humankind. If I accept as a scientist that no single culture can be judged from the outside but known only from the inside, the horizon that a culture has proposed for humanity is up for criticism, discussion, and even rejection. 7 The idea behind the concept of nationality has been lost in the development of the modern social sciences. Surprisingly, nationality has come to be seen as the equivalent of “citizenship.” However, in the nineteenth century, a nationalité was a cultural group, something close to an ethnic group living in a specific territory within the scope of an empire or a dominant group. A nationality was not a nation, but could become one. 8 This lost paradise was the incentive for searching for a better place on this earth. America became Europe’s new world. And among all nations, it was the United States, because of its modern and democratic values, that would epitomize this European dream. For all the Europeans who could not go to America, the search for a better place would pass through the contestation of the medieval order and possibly, as was the case in France, the Revolution.
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9 In today’s world, countries are engaged in modernisation without having their culture and political system shaken up by modernity. Saudi Arabia and many Arab-Muslim countries are good examples; in many respects, China is as well. 10 On a given territory, a minority can be dominant but at the price of a repressive limitation of the citizen space for the majority group. Such was the case in French Algeria, where the citizen space was reserved for the European French minority: it was also the case in Iraq, where the Sunni minority controlled the state. 11 A comparison of the university students’ lists in Paris and New York is interesting. If we take the fusions realized in the nineteenth century, we notice an almost perfect symmetry: in France, we find the surnames Dupont, Lemarchand, Rouillard, and the like, and also in some cases Schirmer (a German name from Alsace), Vermeesch (a Flemish from Northern France), and Poullouec (from Brittany), and finally, some names such as Porto, Gomez, Santinelli, and Jashkevitch, that are today as French as French can be. In the United States, we find a core group of Smith, Thacker, Compton, and McTavish, along with some Germansounding names such as Bush, Schwartznegger, and Eisenhower, and finally some names like Gonzales, Manuelli, Van Lent, and so on, that are today as American as American can be. 12 At the same time, emboldened by his victory, Bismarck, chancellor of the Empire, fought for forging a homogeneous state by reducing regional cultural identity (Kulturkampf) and forcing the assimilation of minorities to a national German culture of Prussian inspiration. 13 Curious paradoxes can ensue. For example, the multiculturalist discourse was used in United States to justify the armed intervention in Serbia. The argument went as follows: the Serbs were said to be engaging in a reactionary nationalism by attacking the multicultural fabric of the former Yugoslavia. I do not think Yugoslavia has ever been multicultural: cultural groups or nationalities were frozen in their limited territory and cohabitation was imposed by a totalitarian power. Ethnic cleansing, no matter how horrific it is, should not make us forget that the modern history of Europe has been marked by forced and unforced movements intended to equate one territory with a single, if not dominant, cultural group. Paradoxically, the Dayton agreements brought back the old Wilsonian recipe in creating a confederated state whose parts are culturally homogenous.
5 National Majorities in New States: Managing the Challenge of Diversity John Coakley Acting as midwife for the birth of a new state is a formidable enterprise even for the boldest of revolutionary elites, but creating a new nation is an even more demanding challenge. To quote a much-cited observation from the nationalist writer and former Piedmontese prime minister Massimo d’Azeglio, “Italy is made; now we must make Italians” (Seton-Watson 1967, 13). In many respects, this resembled the challenge that was shortly to be faced by a new empire to the north: how to transform Bavarians, Saxons, Prussians, and others into true Germans. It also resembled the process that was less spectacularly but no less significantly under way further west: the process of transformation of “peasants into Frenchmen,” to use the evocative title of Eugen Weber’s (1976) book or of “forging the nation” of Britons, to use the metaphorical title of Linda Colley’s (1992) work.1 These processes may well have been universal in the nation-building era since the nineteenth century. If new states were being created as a consequence of waves of political revolution, so too were new nations coming into existence as part of a process of sociocultural regeneration. It is probably fair to say, though, that in no case was the process entirely successful in ensuring the emergence of a monocultural “nation” loyal to its partner state. In all cases, there remained unassimilated fragments that presented, in varying degrees, challenges to the state authorities.2 The object of this chapter is to explore the range of perspectives that were (and continue to be) open to the leadership of the demographically dominant population or “nation” in such cases. In some instances we are facilitated in this project by the rhetoric of the
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dominant national group. The leadership of certain nationalist movements has distinguished between the state and the majority community, or “nation,” and has striven consciously to mobilise the latter, with a view to gaining power in the state and reducing it to what it defines as “the will of the nation.” This was the position of the Nazi movement in Germany and of the Fascist movement in Italy, each of which rested on an ideological blend of anti-liberal radical nationalism and anti-materialist socialism (Sternhell 1994, 9–14). What has been described as a “curious phenomenon of numerically dominant ethnic communities manifesting a ‘minority complex’” has also been detected elsewhere in the world, with Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka, the Hindutva movement in India, and Bhumiputraism among the Malays of Malaysia as examples (Pfaff-Czarnecka and Rajasingham-Senayake 1999, 13). Ironically, although majority nationalism characteristically defines its objective as strengthening the state with which it so strongly identifies, its program commonly has the opposite effect, pushing minorities to consider the pursuit of further autonomy, if not secession. Instances of this phenomenon have been identified in the former Yugoslavia (Conversi 2003) and in Canada (Gagnon 2003). More typically, though, we encounter considerable difficulty in isolating the perspective of the “majority” community from that of the state itself. Consummation of the state-nation marriage in so many contemporary societies means that state leaders are typically also the leading representatives of the majority nation, and vice versa. Although the distinction between the state and the majority nation is conceptually clear, maintaining such clarity at the level of ideological analysis is much more difficult: the two categories tend to be coextensive, and their respective ideological stances and priorities on the question of national minorities may be hard to disaggregate. For this reason, we are commonly forced to confine our attention to the policies adopted by the state itself and the ideological position in which they are embedded, using these to infer the standpoint of elites in the majority population. In this, we are facilitated by the fact that the specific policies followed by states and their ideological justification tend to be concrete and easy to identify and that they have been subjected to a considerable degree of academic analysis.3 Our main interest here lies, however, primarily in the more diffuse political culture of the ethnic majority whose values and priorities state policies reflect. In tackling this, we may start with a familiar
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typology. As is well known, analysts commonly distinguish two models of nationalism that have radically different implications for attitudes towards minorities: “civic” nationalism and “ethnic” nationalism” (Smith 1995, 97–102). This dichotomy is analytically useful, provided we do not assume that all nationalist movements fall into one category or the other. It could, indeed, be argued more plausibly that no nationalist movement falls unambiguously into either of these categories, because even in the most “civic” of nationalist movements we will find, somewhere, elements of ethnic chauvinism, and even in apparently ethnically defined movements we will find at least some voices arguing for a broader approach. Furthermore, we need to be cautious about the implicit and often self-serving Eurocentric bias of this dichotomy. As Hechter (2000, 15) put it vividly and not inaccurately, most classifications of nationalist movements “distinguish the liberal, culturally inclusive (Sleeping Beauty) nationalisms characteristic of Western Europe from the illiberal, culturally exclusive (Frankenstein’s monster) nationalisms more often found elsewhere.”4 Hidden beneath this simple civic-ethnic dichotomy, however, we may identify two dimensions, rather than a single one. The first is essentially analytical or interpretative: whether one views society from an individual-centred or a group-centred perspective. The political process may be seen as involving individual citizens as the crucial, if not the sole, social and political actors, or the role of other collectivities, such as social or ethnic groups, may be recognised – either in addition to the role of individuals or, in more conservative variants, as an alternative to these. The second perspective is a prescriptive or normative one: the extent to which the political community should extend to all potential actors, or rather be restricted to a smaller group. The more inclusive position on this dimension implies the incorporation of all individuals and groups; alternatively, a more selective criterion may be advanced as a filter mechanism. Interpreting these dimensions as dichotomous is of course an oversimplification, but it is a necessary one for typological purposes. If we cross-classify the two dimensions, as illustrated in table 1, we get four ideal-type positions of rather uneven importance. One – combining non-recognition of groups with excluding them from political participation – is self-contradictory and incompatible with the circumstances of modern, democratic societies, and it is not further discussed here (it is associated with a form of elite rule). But the
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Table 1 Majority Approaches towards Minorities: A Typology Broad political strategy
Exclusive Inclusive
Level of Recognition of Groups Low
High
Elite rule Assimilation
Elimination Incorporation
other three form a useful framework for exploring the approaches commonly adopted by national majorities in responding to minorities in their midst. First, explicit recognition of the existence of minorities is an important precondition for including them within the constitutional framework, as in the bottom right quadrant of table 1. But such recognition is also compatible with a second, quite different approach: elimination of minorities from the political process also implies recognizing them in the first place (as represented in the top right quadrant). Third, and finally, failure to recognise minorities as such need not imply their exclusion from state structures: their members may, as individuals, be fully incorporated within the constitutional system on a basis of equality with everyone else, though their status as a group is not acknowledged – an approach compatible with assimilation of minorities (bottom left quadrant). This new classification takes us some distance from Sleeping Beauty and Frankenstein’s monster. In fact, it would be more appropriate to replace the bewitched princess by a less attractive duo, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: there is a strong case for replacing the stereotype of the Western, “inclusive” version of nationalism, benign in its outer form, by a two-sided image, prepared on the one hand to protect national minorities and on the other to destroy them.5 Furthermore, there is a case for replacing Dr Frankenstein’s wicked but blundering creation by a more fiendishly calculating monster, Count Dracula, in pursuing the image of the ethnically based, exclusive model of nationalism. The three perspectives discussed above form the basis of the next three sections of this chapter, each of which is introduced through the words of a classic (or, in one case, notorious) progenitor. The juxtaposition of science fiction characters with well-known advocates of particular approaches may appear anomalous, and in one case it is decidedly so. The laboratory in which Dr Jekyll seeks to
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perform his good deeds is described in the work of the English Catholic gentleman historian, John Acton; the cityscape that forms the background for Mr Hyde’s crimes is introduced, rather less happily, in the work of Acton’s contemporary the English philosopher and political economist John Stuart Mill; and the terrain in which Count Dracula pursues his victims is presented through the work of the German historian and Berlin professor Heinrich von Treitschke. While the nineteenth-century political background and apparent reification of national groups that marks these authors’ works gives their views an old-fashioned ring, their reputations as voices of standpoints similar to the three presented here are sufficiently secure to ensure their suitability for this purpose (though Mill fits uncomfortably into the category he is given here, as will be seen below). The chapter concludes with a short speculative section addressing what then becomes an important question: what factors or circumstances encourage or promote the dominance of one of these approaches over the others in particular societies?
Incorporating Minorities The notion of a multicultural or multinational state as a worthy end in itself has for well over a century been associated with the thought of Lord Acton. For Acton, the idea of several national groups sharing the same state was “of all possible combinations the most favourable to the establishment of a highly developed system of freedom” (1907, 296). As he put the case, The coexistence of several nations under the same state is a test, as well as the best security of its freedom. It is also one of the chief instruments of civilisation; and, as such, it is in the natural and providential order, and indicates a state of greater advancement than the national unity which is the ideal of modern liberalism. The combination of different nations in one state is as necessary a condition of civilised life as the combination of men in society. Inferior races are raised by living in political union with races intellectually superior. Exhausted and decaying nations are revived by the contact of a younger vitality. Nations in which the elements of organisation and the capacity for government have been lost … are restored and educated anew under the discipline of a stronger and less corrupted race. (1907, 290)
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History has dealt harshly with Acton’s prescription, as states that defined themselves self-consciously as multinational – from AustriaHungary at the beginning of the twentieth century to the Soviet Union at its end – fell victim to less-inclusive forms of nationalism. Nevertheless, national majorities, especially when their majority status has been precarious, have shown themselves disposed in certain circumstances to acknowledge institutionally the status of other national groups. Recognition by the majority community that the state is shared with one or more minorities has variable consequences for the degree of institutionalised recognition that is on offer. At a minimum, an inclusive strategy entails acknowledgment of the cultural rights of minorities in such areas as education and perhaps language and religion. But over and above the set of policies commonly known as “multiculturalism,” incorporation of minorities may be given important political institutional expression. Broadly speaking, there are two approaches, and these are not mutually exclusive. Power may be divided between different layers of government; or power may be shared within the same layer. The most characteristic form of division of power between different layers of government is, of course, federalism. But quite often the question whether a state structure is or is not federal is a matter of degree, rather than an issue of categorical classification, and the extent to which federal systems are authentic attempts to accord recognition to minorities is similarly variable. As is well known, the balance of power between a federal state and its component units may vary greatly in theory and may vary even more in practice; and power need not be distributed symmetrically between the component units. Furthermore, these units need not correspond to the ethnonational groups into which the population is divided. The most “generous” form of federalism (but perhaps also the most reckless from the perspective of integrationist elements within the majority community) is one that provides for boundaries of constituent units that match closely those of minority communities and that give them maximum power. The least generous is one where boundaries are drawn in such a way that they cut through the territories of minority communities and group them with other communities – especially in circumstances where the degree of power that passes to the constituent units is close to the minimum that is definitionally conceivable. The former Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and with some qualification Yugoslavia represented instances where ethnic federalism lay
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close to the “generous” end of the spectrum. Use of the past tense illustrates, though, precisely how unstable such federations may be. In reality they were held together by a relatively centralised Communist Party whose organisational integrity overrode the much looser structures of the state; but collapse of the authority of the party led to dissolution of the state. Belgium and India represent two further cases of countries whose territorial units once substantially ignored linguistic or ethnonational boundaries but which have been moving to become ethnic federations. Similar tendencies might be identified in Spain as it moves down the path towards federalism in a rather asymmetrical way. Spain, however, shares with certain other multicultural societies, such as Switzerland and Canada, the reality that its federal structure was not designed to correspond to the frontiers of “majority” and “minority” communities; the territory of the “majority,” in particular, in all these cases is divided between several units.6 Although territorial division of power between two or more layers is the most characteristic form of partitioning power, it is not the only one (see McRae 1975). Power may also be divided between the centre and minority communities on a non-territorial basis. However, since power generally requires the capacity to coerce and coercion typically requires definition of a territorial jurisdiction, the range of powers that may be exercised on this basis is small. Examples were to be found in the medieval and early modern world (as in the millet system in the Ottoman Empire, which allowed non-Muslim minorities an extensive measure of self-rule, similar arrangements for Jews in the Polish Commonwealth, and separate representation for recognised “national” groups in pre-1867 Transylvania). As a modern mechanism for ethnic conflict resolution, this approach is associated in particular with the work of social democratic Austro-Marxist theorists Karl Renner and Otto Bauer in the closing years of the Habsburg monarchy. Noting the inextricable intermingling of ethnic and linguistic groups in certain parts of the monarchy, they proposed that in addition to the existing federal system a form of “national cultural autonomy” could be instituted. This would entail formal recognition of national groups, who would be given certain rights – including rights of political representation – regardless of where they lived (see Coakley 1994; Nimni 2005). Modern examples of this form of autonomy are not easy to come by. The ideas of the Austro-Marxists were implemented in Moravia in 1905, with the introduction of separate electoral rolls for Czechs
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and Germans, and they achieved some success in interwar Estonia, where, under the terms of the Cultural Autonomy Law of 1925, dispersed German and Jewish minorities were permitted to establish their own self-governing cultural councils. More recently, beginning in 1970 Belgium began experimenting with this model: in addition to the division of the country into three regions (Flanders, Wallonia, and Brussels) that over time acquired federal-type characteristics, a division of the population into two cultural communities (Dutchand French-speaking) was recognised. This experience illustrates one of the realities of non-territorial devolution: to be sustainable, it must be based on a population that is territorially dispersed. The Dutch-speaking Cultural Council in Belgium quickly recognised that its terrain of jurisdiction was virtually identical to that of the Flemish Regional Council, and the two bodies were merged to form an essentially territorial entity (the same logic did not apply on the francophone side, because of the distinct geographical identity of the large French-speaking community in Brussels). Other interesting examples of this form of autonomy arise in the case of certain “indigenous” peoples, such as the Maori in New Zealand and the Saami in Norway. Especially – but not exclusively – when ethnonational groups are intermingled, the strategy of sharing rather than dividing power may be embraced. This rests on a rather distinctive approach to government formation and collective decision making, one which has been summarised in particular in the debate about consociational democracy (see, for example, Lijphart 1977; McRae 1974) or in the context of the broader concept of “consensual democracy” (Lijphart 1984). Though developed initially to describe an institutional formula designed to resolve problems of government in “segmented societies” (where the basis of segmentation had to do with religious values in particular), this approach arguably has even greater salience in respect to ethnically divided societies. Its key features include the notion of governments representing all major social segments, proportional sharing of public sector posts and resources between segments, and decision making based on consensus rather than majority rule.7 The heated debate about consociational democracy focuses not just on theoretical matters but also on empirical ones (such as the question whether the original cases selected as examples in fact met the criteria) and on normative issues (such as the question whether consociational democracy can produce just and stable government).
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Lijphart offered Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, and the Netherlands as exemplars of this form of government up to the late 1960s, though in each of these cases the criterion of segmental cohesion was religious-ideological, not ethnonational. Critics of this model of government point to its failure in Cyprus in 1963, in Northern Ireland in 1974, and in Lebanon in 1975 to illustrate its essential instability. It is clear, though, that in each of these cases the alternative was not a stable alternative form of government but civil unrest resulting in thousands of deaths; and it is striking that recent efforts to find a solution to divisions in these societies (the Taif Agreement of 1989 in Lebanon, the Good Friday agreement of 1998 in Northern Ireland, and the Annan Plan of 2002–4 in Cyprus) were all essentially consociational in approach. This discussion may read like a menu of approaches that political elites within states may adopt when seeking to overcome ethnic divisions. But it is presented here to provide an insight into a more subtle issue: the perspective of the majority community, or at least of its leaders, on the question of how to deal with minorities. The approaches discussed here imply the following characteristics on the part of the majority community (or, to be more precise, of the community that has traditionally been dominant: this is not always a demographic majority). 1 An acknowledgement that the dominant culture is not the only one and that appropriate recognition should be afforded to minority cultures 2 An acceptance of the logic that since society is divided, the formula of a centralised state governed by simple political majorities is inappropriate, and that some kind of institutional compromises should be made to involve minorities as such in the process of government 3 A disposition to justify these principles on grounds of Realpolitik, possibly driven by domestic or international pressure rather than by collective personal conviction (in other words, the majority is prepared to settle for these compromises rather than necessarily welcoming them as the ideal solution to the problem of majorityminority relations). In certain respects, these conclusions are reversed in the next set of approaches, to which I now turn.
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Excluding Minorities More commonly, minorities are seen not as an additional cultural resource but as a threat to the majority nation. It would be easy to find critics of Acton’s inclusive approach to national minorities, but one of the most striking is his near-contemporary fellow historian Treitschke. For the latter, the formula for dealing with minorities was more brutal: the dominant group must prevail. When several nations are united under one state, the simplest relationship is that the one that wields the authority should also be the superior in civilisation. Matters can then develop comparatively peacefully, and when the blending is complete it is felt to have been inevitable, although it can never be accomplished without endless misery for the subjugated race. The most remarkable fusion took place after this fashion in the colonies of North-East Germany. It was the murder of a people; that cannot be denied, but after the amalgamation was complete it became a blessing. What could the Prussians have contributed to history?8 The Germans were so infinitely their superiors that to be Germanised was for them as great a good fortune as it was for the Wends. (von Treitschke 1916, 1: 282–3) This logic was extended to groups that, in Treitschke’s view, could not be assimilated – the Jews, for example. In his view, the integrity of the majority nation required protection: the German people must be aroused so that “it becomes a second nature to repel involuntarily everything which is foreign to the Germanic nature.” More specifically, “whenever he finds his life sullied by the filth of Judaism the German must turn from it, and learn to speak boldly about it” (von Treitschke 1916, 1: 302). It is, of course, a short gap from here to the more politically explicit message of Treitschke’s intellectual descendants and the attempts to “purify” the German nation under Nazi administration. This form of militant nationalism – commonly, as in the German case, extending to racism – may be associated with pursuit of the most barbaric policies, but it may also lie in disguise (sometimes light, sometimes deep) behind apparently more tolerant nationalist facades. The notion of the state as the inherited “property” of the majority community (or, in some cases, of a community that constitutes a
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demographic minority) is deeply ingrained in many societies. This notion may lead to a conscious or unconscious failure even to recognise the existence of minorities, a perspective discussed in the next section; but it may also be associated with a policy of formally recognising minorities with a view to marginalising them. From this perspective, in other words, the minority or the “enemy within” can only be dealt with if its existence is first accepted. The starting point of this approach is that the majority acknowledges the existence of one or more minorities, and that this reality is unwelcome. The matter may be resolved by procuring the exclusion or disappearance of the minority. In some cases, this may be secured, at least in part, by policies of forcible assimilation: members of minority communities join the majority by accepting its defining characteristics – by converting to its religious system, for instance, or by shifting to its language and culture. Thus, after their defeat at the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620, many Czechs converted to Catholicism, though this move towards assimilation was undermined by their ultimate failure to switch to the German language and culture of the central Austrian administration. Notwithstanding their defeat in a set of seventeenth-century wars, however, the Irish failed to convert in significant numbers to Protestantism, and this ultimately undermined the effects of the much more successful efforts to ensure that they would switch to the language and culture of the British state. But many other minorities have been lost to history precisely because such religious or linguistic “conversion” efforts succeeded. Commonly, though, the strategy of forcible assimilation is resisted not just by the minority but by the majority, which may see its “racial” or cultural purity threatened by the resulting alien influx. Instead, the minority is excluded from the state either on the legalpolitical level or on the physical level. Withdrawal of political rights from minorities was rather more commonplace in the past than would be tolerated by contemporary principles of political representation. Indeed, it could be used by small, dominant groups to ensure their rule even against very numerous marginalised groups. Thus, European colonial regimes in Africa and Asia were able to confine political rights essentially to settler minorities, disenfranchising indigenous majorities. The survival of the apartheid-era regime in South Africa similarly depended on a constitutional system that confined full political rights to whites.
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Surrogate criteria could also be used to the same effect, though more imperfectly. Thus, in the United Kingdom, depriving Catholics of the right to sit in parliament (up to 1829) had the effect of excluding not just Catholics, but in particular people of Irish background, from political rights. In the Estonian and Latvian areas of the Russian Empire, the old estate-based system of political representation confined power to the noble classes, thereby disenfranchising not just peasants but Estonians and Latvians, to the advantage of the tiny German minority. The imposition of literacy tests for voting in certain southern US states similarly had the effect of excluding not just illiterates but blacks. In the contemporary world, the low level of international tolerance for restrictions of these kinds inhibits the implementation of overtly exclusionary criteria for political participation, but states are still able to exploit areas of ambiguity: the imposition of demanding residency requirements and obstacles to the acquisition of citizenship may be used to minimise the political impact of minority groups. An alternative to the withdrawal of political rights may be the exclusion of a minority by political means. The minority may be allocated its “homeland” and, indeed, it may be forced to live there. This “homeland” may be given autonomy, or even a form of formal independence that is recognised at least by the original host state. This permits the withdrawal of any rights to participate in the affairs of the de facto ruling authority, since the “homeland” is now separate and the former minority may enjoy its “rights” there. This strategy was pursued vigorously by the South African government in the later years of apartheid, as Africans were classified by ethnic group and attributed to a “homeland” or, as such entities were dismissively called, a “bantustan.” Current Israeli policy suggests that this option is being considered as a mechanism for dealing with the large Palestinian population on Israel’s de facto territory. Minorities may, of course, also be excluded by the more radical policy of physical expulsion, which can dramatically alter the ethnic composition of a state. Too many examples could be cited, but the expulsion of several million Germans from much of Central and Eastern Europe (and in particular from Czechoslovakia and Poland) immediately after the Second World War is an outstanding one. There are many other examples, including the flight of Palestinians from what is now Israel in 1948 and 1967, of Greeks and Turks from northern and southern Cyprus respectively in 1974, and of
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several different groups in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Sometimes, the harsh realities of expulsion are disguised by more euphemistic language, as in describing the “exchange” of Greek, Turkish, and Bulgarian populations in the 1920s or the “repatriation” (on the initiative of the German government) of the Baltic Germans from Estonia and Latvia in 1939. The ultimate form of exclusion of minorities is, of course, genocide – a phenomenon of which there have been too many examples in the twentieth century, with the policy of systematic extermination of Europe’s Jewish and Roma populations during the Second World War as the most notorious example. Once again, the range of approaches discussed above will tell us more about the priorities of politicians and state officials than about the broad perspective of the majority community in the states that have been used as examples – at least directly. We may nevertheless draw certain inferences about the probable value systems of the majority community in these cases. •
•
•
An insistence that the dominant culture is the only appropriate one for the state and that other cultures should not be tolerated in the public sphere (or, perhaps, even in the private sphere), coupled with a rejection of minorities as foreign, commonly expressed through various forms of xenophobia A commitment to the exclusion of minorities from public life, since they are seen as alien, disloyal, and potential threats to the state, whether because of the inappropriateness of their own demands or their potential (and “treasonable”) alliance with related groups in other states An ideologically powerful and emotive commitment to this approach, open to easy manipulation by elites, and a tendency to question the loyalty of those who dissent from it.
Given the extent to which the forms of recognition of minorities discussed in the last section may be turned on their head and used against minorities, as discussed in this section, it may well appear that formal acknowledgment of ethnic difference is a hazardous step. This may indeed be the case, but as the next section will show, failure to acknowledge difference may also have unfortunate consequences for some groups and may act as a cloak for less benign policies.
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Ignoring Minorities The options discussed in the last two sections, accommodating or eliminating minorities, are not the only ones; as argued above, there is a third possibility – ignoring minorities. The implications of this approach are outlined by the major social theorist to which Acton’s essay (cited above) was a reaction. For Mill, Acton’s prescription for freedom is entirely reversed: as he put it, “it is in general a necessary condition of free institutions that the boundaries of governments should coincide in the main with those of nationalities” (Mill 1958, 232–3). But what, then, happens to minorities? For Mill, there is a satisfactory outcome in appropriate circumstances: Experience proves that it is possible for one nationality to merge and be absorbed in another; and when it was originally an inferior and more backward portion of the human race the absorption is greatly to its advantage. Nobody can suppose that it is not more beneficial to a Breton, or a Basque of French Navarre, to be brought into the current of the ideas and feelings of a highly civilised and cultivated people – to be a member of the French nationality, admitted on equal terms to all the privileges of French citizenship, sharing the advantages of French protection and the dignity and prestige of French power – than to sulk on his own rocks, the half-savage relic of past times, revolving in his own little mental orbit, without participation or interest in the general movement of the world (1958, 233–4). Moving closer to home, Mill added that “the same remark applies to the Welshman or the Scottish Highlander as members of the British nation.” It is important to point out that Mill is not an ideal spokesman for what was later to become jacobin nationalism. Although his reference to the absorption of the Bretons into the French nation anticipates Treitschke’s reference to the absorption of the Old Prussians into the German nation, his significant omission of any reference to the absorption of the Irish into the British nation points to his distinctive starting point: his support for what would become known as the “principle of nationality,” the notion that each nation should, where possible, have its own state. It was, in his view, only where existing political structures could not be further adjusted
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to match the frontiers of nationality that nationalists or national minorities should be assimilated by the dominant nationality.9 There is indeed an important perspective from which the notion of pursuing policies of “ethnic blindness” is a positive one (see van den Berghe 1981; Horowitz 2000). The great progressive forces of history commonly defended the notion of “the people,” without discrimination on the basis of ethnic background, against the embedded privileges of the old regime. More specifically, the French Revolution sought explicitly to replace the notion of government by corporations (including different gradations of nobility and clergy, as well as the privileged burghers and others of the “third estate”) by the notion of government by “the people.” The great and ultimately victorious struggle of the more radical French revolutionaries, as in the case of their counterparts elsewhere, was directed at achieving full civil and political rights for all citizens on the basis of the fundamental equality of all. As bastions of privilege fell to this ideology – with the process all but completed in Europe by the end of the First World War – this radical democratic and egalitarian vision appeared to have been canonised by history. So, too, was its unstated prescription on the national question: the opening of the civilisation of the majority to members of minority groups and the implicit requirement that minorities take advantage of this. This development was not without irony; the logic behind it has been criticised as “the strange case of national ethnic unity, a barbarous ideal, never perfectly realised in western Europe, yet enthusiastically embraced at exactly the time when western European nations were building world-girdling empires, where diverse peoples met and mingled on a scale never equalled before” (McNeill 1986, 59). The implication of this approach for minorities is clear: they do not exist. The ideology is indeed inclusive, based on a “civic” notion of the nation, rather than exclusive, based on an “ethnic” notion of the nation. But minorities are seen as no more than the sum of their parts: each member of a “minority” community is more importantly a member of the “national” community, whether he or she likes this or not. Indeed, the jacobin conception of the nation does not distinguish between nation and state: nationality and citizenship are one and the same. This has important implications for political organization. On the one hand, the appropriate mechanism for collective decision making is the principle of majority rule, without concession
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to special minority interests (unless the majority chooses to make an exception of these in particular circumstances). On the other, there is no need for any kind of territorial devolution: the people are to be ruled from the centre, typically through some kind of prefectorial system. The jacobin world view does, however, have another side. It may well reject the notion of a state church or of any link between the state and a particular religious community, but this may hide an unspoken or perhaps even unconscious sympathy with a particular religions disposition.10 The state may well hold back from declaring any language the official one, as in the case of Belgium’s constitution of 1831, but this may well be because the dominance of the language of the centre is so complete that endowing it with constitutional status is entirely unnecessary (even in the case of Belgium, where most people spoke Flemish or Dutch, rather than the de facto state language, French). Indeed, the cultural “free market” of the jacobin position – which in reality privileges one culture above others – may be little more than a cover for a policy of assimilation. The state, after all, has to have a language of wider communication, and this must be the language of the centre; the status of all other languages and cultures is marginal, and this is reflected in state institutions, especially in the education system. In many respects, the principles underlying this approach have a much broader reach within the majority community than the alternatives discussed in the last two sections. They are by no means confined to political leaders and middle-level elites but appear to have been internalised by large sections of the population. Broadly speaking, they include the following components. •
•
An implicit but deeply rooted acceptance that the dominant culture is the only appropriate one for the state, but an openness to the absorption of members of other cultures into this; this disposition to welcome others into the national family may, however, represent implicit but committed support for policies of assimilation A combination of centralising and majoritarian political principles, manifested in a reluctance to see the “indivisible state” undermined by local autonomy and expressed in a commitment to the norms of majority rule
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An ideological defence of this position that sees it as based on universal principles and that is typically disseminated through the education system and rests on a widely shared assumption that this approach is just, democratic, and compatible with the direction of historical progress.
The jacobin approach may represent, then, not so much a progressive rejection of the group-centred alternatives but a disguised form of ethnic hegemony.
Determinants of Majority Preferences Since the positions just discussed are ideal types, we should not expect to find any pure examples. It is extremely unlikely that any one “national majority” will conform entirely to one type; even if one perspective is dominant, alternative approaches will also be advocated. Indeed, we may expect to find variation not just between individuals but also within them, as people vacillate between perspectives, adopting one or another with varying degrees of conviction, much as Dr Jekyll was transformed into Mr Hyde and eventually alternated between these two very different human forms. Nevertheless, we will commonly find majorities – or at least their elites – clustered closer to one of these positions than to the others. How are we to account for this? It may be worth beginning with a priori principles and then seeing what evidence exists as to their impact on public ideology. In general terms, it seems reasonable to assume that four sets of factors are likely to be of significance: the historical characteristics of the majority itself, the multidimensional relationship between the majority and minorities, the constitutional and political cultural tradition of the state that encloses these, and the changing international environment. Many of the features discussed below are extremely difficult to measure, so these remarks are intended as speculative, and as pointing to interesting questions for future research, rather than as being in any way definitive. Majority Characteristics Although it is not necessarily the most important feature, the historical experience of the majority will obviously be of great significance
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for the formation of its own attitude towards minorities. Other things being equal, one might expect majorities that have recently acquired their “own” state to be the most tolerant of minorities, since they would have some capacity to empathize with issues important to stateless peoples; one might expect majorities whose state was created by a recent process of unification to be least tolerant, given fresh memories of their struggle for boundary definition; and one might expect majorities in long-established states to occupy an intermediate position. It would be difficult, however, to produce convincing evidence in favour of these generalisations. Although examples to illustrate the first of these points could easily be offered, the counter-examples are more striking and suggest that the initial generalisations are naively optimistic. Many national movements that had shaken off external “oppressors,” such as the Irish and the Hungarians, showed relatively little disposition to make allowances for the minorities that would be found within their own borders, rejecting in relation to their own subordinate peoples the very principles whose observance they had so loudly demanded of their own former masters. On the other points, too, the evidence is mixed. Although some post-unification nationalist movements, such as the German and the Italian ones, were indeed characterised by forms of militant majority nationalism, especially during the interwar years, others, such as that of Switzerland, were not (though this case raises difficult questions of interpretation, depending on the definition of the potential axis of conflict: Swiss Germans versus French- and Italian-speakers or Swiss versus foreigners). Among long-established states one indeed finds many examples of jacobinism, but also more tolerant attitudes towards minorities, as in Great Britain and the former Soviet Union (where, notwithstanding the fate of certain minorities, especially under Stalin, many other cultures survived because of a relatively enlightened nationalities policy). There may, on the other hand, be certain circumstances in which majorities see positive attractions in the existence of minorities, especially if these are too small to be threatening. Although Ireland’s small Irish- (Gaelic-) speaking population lacks classic minority characteristics, its existence, and the requirement that the English-speaking majority acquire knowledge of the Irish language, provides a distinctive strand to an Irish culture that is
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otherwise becoming increasingly English. For Canadians, the status of French as an official language and the extent of public sector bilingualism serve to define more clearly the cultural boundary with the much larger political system to the south, with which most Canadians share a language. In these circumstances, then, it appears that pragmatism modifies principle in shaping majority attitudes towards minorities. Minority Characteristics Several features of any given minority and of its relationship to the majority community are likely to affect majority perspectives. The three most obvious are cultural distance, relative size, and resource mobilization capacity. Once again, counter-examples could be given, but the examples below illustrate the more characteristic form of these relationships. Other things being equal, one would expect the majority to be more favourably disposed towards culturally adjacent than towards culturally remote minorities. Thus, in interwar Czechoslovakia Czechs would have found it easier to form an alliance with the Slovaks than with the Germans (an attitude that was not necessarily reciprocated). In Britain, the incorporation of the Scots and Welsh has so far proved less demanding than the incorporation of more culturally distant waves of recent immigrants. In Spain, contrasting relations between the Castilian majority and the Catalan minority, on the one hand, and the Basque minority, on the other, may be explained in part by the cultural remoteness of the latter (a circumstance that may also be linked with the much more militant forms of expression of Basque nationalism). Again, other things being equal, one would expect majorities to be more sympathetic towards small or declining minorities than towards large or growing ones. Shrinking minorities, such as Swedish speakers in Finland, pose no threat, and the majority can afford to be generous. Large, growing minorities, such as Catholics in Northern Ireland, present a much greater challenge to the status of the majority, and therefore attract high levels of hostility. On the other hand, precisely because a minority is large and growing, it may possess sufficient resources to force the majority to compromise, as we will see below.
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Finally, then, one would expect majorities to be more hostile towards but more likely to yield to minorities that possess powerful economic and political resources. These resources include, most obviously, absolute and relative size and potentially powerful external allies. But they also include possession of a territory that is demographically cohesive and therefore potentially open to secession. Possession of natural assets or relative wealth may also be of great importance. These advantages, however, are not necessarily translated into powerful political resources. Scotland and Wales may well possess some of these characteristics within the United Kingdom, but their capacity to mobilise politically is compromised by failure of the nationalist parties to win majority support, as illustrated by election results over the years; most voters in these countries continue to support the parties of the centre, and especially the Labour Party. State Tradition “State tradition” and “majority tradition” may easily be confused, but they are obviously conceptually separate. By “state tradition” is meant the set of inherited constitutional and legal norms and practices that structure relations between citizens and the central authorities (see Dyson 1980 for an overview of the European pattern). This framework may either impede or facilitate recognition of formally organised groups within the state. The importance of this tradition becomes clear if we contrast the successor states of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires (with their long-established practices of recognising ethnic minorities) with, say, Ireland, which inherited an essentially British constitutional apparatus. In the former cases, recognition of ethnic minorities has been, for good or ill, easy and apparently natural; this is reflected in the wealth of ethnic information in the state censuses and other official statistics of these countries over the decades. In Ireland, as in much of the rest of Western Europe, by contrast, identification of minorities – and, a fortiori, measurement of their size – has been much more problematic: the notion of the centralized, individual-centred state has been much more powerfully ingrained, and language questions in censuses are more likely to deal with linguistic competence (an educational issue) than with membership of a linguistic minority (an ethnonational issue).
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International System Finally, the international system will have a big impact on state policy. This is likely to be expressed not just through a set of core values that are widely shared internationally but also through specific international conventions and treaties (see Claude 1955; Laponce 1960). This point may be illustrated vividly by contrasting the League of Nations with its successor, the United Nations. Given the climate of nation-state creation that marked its birth, it is not surprising that the League took a particular interest in national minorities. Indeed, certain of the new states that appeared after 1918 owed their existence in part to a complex quid pro quo by which they were given independence while at the same time agreeing formally to guarantee the status of minorities (Mair 1928; Galántai 1992). It is to be assumed that the majority in Poland – whose minorities treaty with the League formed a model for similar treaties with other new states – were prepared to accept this compromise, even if reluctantly; and this system guaranteed minorities in Central and Eastern Europe a range of rights that were unavailable to minorities in countries not covered by such treaties, such as the Protestant minority in the Irish Free State. The position of the United Nations was, however, radically different: alleged abuse of their protected position by certain minorities (notably, the Germans) during the interwar period discredited the League system in the eyes of many. The new emphasis was on individual rights, not group rights; and the United Nations system left national majorities with a much freer hand in dealing with their minorities. It was only in the 1990s, under pressure in particular from the disintegration of the geopolitical status quo in Central and Eastern Europe, that such bodies as the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe and its successor, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, began once more to address the issue of national minorities as a systematic problem for policymakers, seeking to define minority rights and appointing a High Commissioner on National Minorities in 1992.11
Conclusion There is, then, some evidence to the effect that national majorities, especially in new states, may opt for one of three ideal-typical
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responses to minorities: they may seek to accommodate them, they may repress them, or they may ignore them (and, by implication, follow a policy of long-term assimilation). As in the case of all ideal types, further qualification is needed: majority perspectives may be contingent and context-dependent; and they are likely to be divided between several types. Discussion of this three-fold set of responses glosses over the extent to which majorities may differentiate between minorities, opting for one response in relation to one minority, another in relation to a second. This emerges in some of the examples given above. The English, for instance, follow rather different policies in relation to the Northern Irish, the Scots and Welsh, and immigrant minorities; and similar vacillation will be found in other states. Attitudes among Canadians and Americans towards indigenous peoples and newer immigrants are likely to be similarly nuanced, and differentiated. The French, Spanish, and Italians have each reacted very differently to their minorities, not merely by distinguishing between long-standing territorial minorities and newer immigrants, but also by discriminating within these categories. The typology also oversimplifies, as we have seen, the set of attitudes within the majority itself, which may be quite divided on attitudes towards minorities. Indeed, it is reasonable to assume that any one majority group will contain elements of each of the three types of approach: adherents to values of civic nationalism who would be happy to assimilate minorities, pluralists who would be prepared to offer them formal recognition, and xenophobes who would like to be rid of them. To follow the analogy with the celebrated characters from science fiction, in other words, we are likely to find the well-meaning doctor, his violent alter ego, and the evil, undead count co-existing uneasily in any one society. Almost certainly, though, we will find some societies in which, at least at particular points in time, one of these figures holds sway over the others. Survey research may help us in identifying such societies, but even then our conclusions will have to be speculative. Similar caution must inform the set of tentative conclusions pointed to in the last section of this chapter. Common sense suggests the importance of particular features of the majority, of the minority or minorities with which it shares a state, of the state tradition itself, and of the international system in shaping majority perspectives on minorities. Easily available evidence calls into
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question, however, the validity of some of these potential explanations. Further research may help in defining a more comprehensive set of relationships and may offer firmer evidence of causation, but it is unlikely to provide a definitive answer to this difficult question. Nevertheless, the shift in focus from minority to majority must form a useful antidote to the conventional understanding of the nature of ethnic conflict, in which it is minorities who are so often either explicitly or by implication seen as being at the root of “the problem.”
notes 1 The great debate as to the distinction between “national,” “ethnic,” and “ethnonational” lies beyond the scope of this paper. 2 For a lively exposition of the complexity of the state-nation relationship, see Keating (2001d). 3 On state policies see, for example, Smooha and Hanf (1992), Coakley (1992), McGarry and O’Leary (1993, 1994), and Schneckener and Senghaas (2003). 4 A similar dualism has been identified in respect of attitudes towards immigrants; see Shafir (1995, 5–6). 5 The historical description of the many “faces” of nationalism by Boyd Shafer (1972) was reduced perceptively by Tom Nairn (1975) to a single, two-faced phenomenon, looking simultaneously, like Janus, in two directions: forwards in the compulsive pursuit of progress, and backwards in the no less necessary cultivation and vindication of their own past. But as Nairn later pointed out, “there are, alas, more than just two general ‘faces’ mixed up in the great, continuing dilemma” (1997, 72). The Jekyll-Hyde duality discussed here needs to be distinguished from Nairn’s Janus-faced phenomenon: it refers to two perspectives on the present, rather than double vision of the past and future. 6 In Spain, the Catalans are also divided into more than one autonomous community, as are the Basques if the Basque claim to Navarre is accepted. In Switzerland it is not appropriate to regard the major linguistic groups as ethnonational groups, but it is worth noting that Francophone Switzerland is divided between six cantons. On the more general issues raised by such cases, see Coakley (2003). 7 A fourth characteristic, segmental autonomy, has already been discussed above.
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8 This is not a reference to the (Germanic) population of the Kingdom of Prussia but to the Old Prussians of Baltic origin, who spoke a Baltic language akin to Latvian and Lithuanian but who had been almost entirely assimilated to German culture by the eighteenth century. The Wends referred to in this extract were a Slavic population that was also substantially assimilated to German culture but of which a fragment survives around Bautzen and Cottbus in eastern Germany, where they are more commonly known as Sorbs. 9 Mill’s classic analysis has given rise to a large literature and became a cornerstone of liberal thought on the national question. David Miller (1995, 10), for example, presented his work in this area as “following here in the footsteps of (among others) John Stuart Mill”; for an extended analysis, see Varouxakis (2002). 10 It is not clear, for instance, that the ban on Muslim head-scarves in French schools represents an attempt to protect standards of neutrality in the name of laïcité, rather than a position of sympathy with a cultural tradition to which the wearing of such scarves is alien. The coexistence of a political tradition more open to minorities alongside the French jacobin perspective is, however, presented in Dimier (2004). 11 For further information, see the high commissioner’s website at http:// www.osce.org/hcnm/ [2006–02–26]. For an overview of the legal position, see Malloy (2005) and Gülalp (2006).
part two Case Studies
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6 British and French Nationalisms Facing the Challenges of European Integration and Globalization John Loughlin In her book Nationalism: Five Paths to Modernity, Liah Greenfeld identifies five different “paths” towards modernity, each actualized by a unique conceptualization of “the nation.” The first path was followed by Britain, the second by France (and the successive ones by Germany, the United States, and Russia). The British and French paths became rivalling world views, with antagonistic conceptions of politics and the economy, state organization, the relationship between state and civil society, and, above all, the role of religion within the political system; and they will form the substance of the discussion here.
Historical Aspects The comparison between France and Great Britain, or, more specifically, England, will be part of a long tradition of such comparisons, including the work of Vincent Wright (1979), Douglas Ashford (1982), or, more recently, Patrick Le Galès (1993) and Cole and John (2001). It is perhaps true that since the foundation of the two kingdoms in the High Middle Ages, the two countries have continuously looked upon one another with not only a certain mistrust but also a certain fascination. Beginning with the conquest of England by William the Conqueror in 1066, the history of the two countries has been intermingled. The Normans, who spoke a version of French, invaded England, and, afterwards, the British and French kingdoms rivalled one another for the land that was to become, throughout the
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centuries, French territory. The Hundred Years War cemented this rivalry, and England’s passage into the Protestant Reformation added an element of religion to it. Despite the mutual antagonism, thinkers and philosophers of both countries continued learning from one another, as is exemplified by the migration of Hobbes’ writings into France and Voltaire’s admiration of the English parliamentary system and constitutional monarchy. Before embarking on this discussion, it must be asked why we speak specifically about “nations.” Are they “modern” nations? Although the term “nation” was employed during the High Middle Ages to signify groups like the English or the French, it was also, to take an example from the time of the Crusades, used simply to denote where one was born (deriving from the Latin natus), with a very blurred reference to linguistic characteristics. What is certain, however, is that England and France, while still not nations in the modern meaning of the term, became “territorial states” with centralist tendencies under the aegis of their monarchs. In the end, it was the state that created the nation. But territorial states were not the only forms of territorial organization, and they coexisted with other, rival forms of organization, such as the Holy Roman Empire or the German Nation, the papacy, city-states, networks of cities like the Hanseatic League, and forms of feudalism. Even in the interior of territorial states like England and France, one could find diverse forms of organization. In France, prior to the simplifications of the 1789 Revolution, and despite centuries of attempts at centralization and uniformity, there existed a large variety of legal, administrative, political, and societal forms of organization, as the historical research of Fernand Braudel (1990) has shown. In England, until the middle of the nineteenth century everything from the system of weights and measures to time zones varied from city to city. Finally, it was the territorial state that got the upper hand over other forms of political organization, especially with the arrival of what is today known as the “modern nation.” It was these states, with their drive towards centralization and uniformity, that were most able to provide an institutional and political framework for the modern nation and, at the same time, to provide the impulse towards its creation. This process summarizes what was, in fact, a long historical path towards modernity, as is explained by Liah Greenfeld in her previously cited work and by historian Roger Martelli in his excellent study, Faut-il défendre la nation?1
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Key Historical Moments It is certainly necessary to avoid an overly retrospective, or teleological, reading of the history of nation and state modernization and to remain conscious of all the complexities involved in the processes. Nevertheless, it is possible to locate several key moments that determine subsequent developments. One such moment was the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, when England became one of the first Protestant states, the Church’s universal spread was shattered, and the foundations for new national churches were laid. The Treaty of Westphalia (1648) put an end to the religious wars and imposed the principle of cuius regio, ejus religio, which had already been applied in the Peace of Augsburg (1555) between Charles V and the Schmalkaldic League to determine the religious composition of the German States. It reinforced the links between the state, religious confession, and national identity. And, even though Catholicism, or, more specifically, the papacy, would challenge the use of this principle as a political model until the end of the nineteenth century, and even thereafter, religion became an essential element of state and national construction. Historian Linda Colley, in her book Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837, demonstrated how the English nation gradually began to define itself by its Protestantism to the point that its people came to see themselves as superior to Catholic nations, especially France, but also Spain, Poland, the Italian States, and, of course, Ireland. This national pride in being English, although primarily religious, also drew on England’s literature (Shakespeare), its political system (the Westminster Parliament), scientific discoveries (for example, those of Isaac Newton), and its rapid economic development and activity (the Industrial Revolution). France, on the other hand, remained Catholic at its core despite Protestant and Jewish minorities; however, it maintained a Gallican form of Catholicism, practically independent from Rome. These two different religious traditions would give birth to the values, political and administrative organization, and cultures of the two nations. The national pride of France resided in the splendid court of its monarchy, its diplomatic influence over the European continent, and its language, philosophy, and literature. The political histories of the two countries also differ. In England, the Glorious Revolution of 1688 saw the confirmation of the power
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of the Parliament of Westminster and a compromise between the landowning aristocracy and the mercantilist bourgeoisie; thus began a particular path towards modernity admired by progressive thinkers throughout the rest of Europe, and, in particular, the French philosophers of the Enlightenment. In France, political evolution was more catastrophic, beginning in 1789 with the French Revolution, which overthrew the old system of monarchy and aristocracy, and continued until the Napoleonic Wars. Although there was some continuity with the ancien régime, the Revolution laid the foundations of modern France and created a new conception of political organization: the nation-state. During the course of the nineteenth century, the nation-state led to the creation of a new political philosophy that was to rival the other ideologies of modernity, including socialism, liberalism, and reactionary conservatism; that philosophy was nationalism. But modern nationalism has been characterized by contradictions and ambiguities. The ideologists of the Revolution were divided into two principal camps: the Jacobins, who advocated a highly centralized state and the suppression of cultural and linguistic minorities, and the Girondins, who were sympathetic to a more decentralized system respectful of differences. We know that it was the Jacobins who gained the upper hand and that Napoleon completed what they had begun, thus creating the modern French state. But, the Girondin tendency never fully disappeared and reappears periodically throughout French history. The fundamental idea of nationalism is that there exists an organic link between the state and the nation, that every nation must have its own state, and that the borders of the state must coincide with those of the nation. It is a simple but powerful idea – one that shattered the existing political systems in Europe. It was in becoming the nation-state that the territorial states would win the upper hand in Europe, to the detriment of cities, networks of cities, what remained of feudalism, and the old Austrian, Ottoman, and Russian Empires.
The Complexities of Nationalism At the same time, nationalism has revealed itself to be a very complex political idea whose expression will vary according to the period when it is adopted and the groups that espouse it (Martelli 1998). It could be conservative or progressive, liberal or socialist,
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libertarian or oppressive, anti-imperialist or imperialist. What is certain, however, is that it is an idea and a movement that has had enormous success if one considers that the nation-state, even if it has known anti-democratic and authoritarian forms, is closely associated with modernity, liberal democracy, social progress, and industrial capitalism. Moreover, the social sciences themselves, whether economics, political science, public administration, or sociology, developed as ways of analyzing and understanding the nation-state. The seemingly simple tenet of nationalism, that each nation is to have its own state, becomes increasingly complex in practice. Great difficulty is encountered in defining the word “nation,” and in elaborating a list of criteria that would be able to distinguish it from other human groups like the tribe or ethnic group. There is, of course, the famous difference between the French and German conceptions of “civic nation” and “ethnic nation,” nation as demos versus nation as ethnos, as conceptualized by Renan and Herder, respectively. The distinction becomes less clear if we consider that demos tends to slide towards ethnos if the former is defined by language, culture, and civilization and that in the context of the modern state, ethnos is obliged to define itself as demos. Thus, in France, universal citizenship of choice, Renan’s daily plebiscite of the French people, became an assimilating citizenship based on the language, culture, and civilization of the French, and particularly the Parisian, elites. Majority nationalism in France proved itself to be a complex and ambiguous phenomenon. On the one hand, it is associated with the ideas and progress and liberation of the Revolution and with democracy and modernity. On the other hand, during the nineteenth century, French nationalism, like British and German nationalisms, also took an imperialist path, and like them acquired colonies colonies in Africa and Asia until the French Empire became the second largest in the world, after the British. The ambiguities of French nationalism can be seen by the fact that it is as much associated with Maurras and Barrès as it is with French socialism and communism. British nationalism, for its part, is essentially the imperialist form of English nationalism. There is a close connection between French imperialist attitudes towards the colonies and attitudes towards the different regions, cultures, and languages inside France itself, which (at least from a Jacobin perspective) were barely tolerated. This intolerance was justified on the grounds of the unity and indivisibility of the French
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nation. In both cases, it was thought that the way forward was assimilation to the “superior” language and culture, and, at least in the regions within France, a great majority of the people were all too happy to participate in this process. The rivalry between France and England resulted in two very different ways of conceptualizing the “nation” and the “state.” For England, with its tradition of Protestant and mercantilist individualism, and philosophers like John Locke, the nation was seen as a composition of free individuals free from political and ecclesiastical hierarchies. In France, the nation remained an abstraction, initially one embodied by the king and then, after the Revolution, by “the people.” The French state was similarly an abstract and legal entity that existed “above” society; there was, however, no English state as such, and one could only speak of a government or a Crown. In France, the state, as an expression of the nation, was as indivisible as the Catholic Church, while in England, the political system was complex, diverse, and asymmetrical, mirroring British Protestantism in all its varieties. English (and subsequently British) and French nationalisms would each express themselves in radically different ways. The English nation annexed Wales, Scotland, and Ireland through a series of Acts of Union to create the United Kingdom.2 France, by contrast, had attempted to assimilate its provinces and countries even before the Revolution but especially afterwards. It thus became the archetypal unitary state, whereas the United Kingdom is more accurately described as a union (or multinational) state, thus keeping the “premodern” state structures while becoming a society with a modern public administration. It is this complexity that makes the notion of nationalism in Great Britain ambiguous and difficult to grasp. Is there a single British nation united in the kingdom or are the primary units the constituent nations? In the UK’s non-written constitution, four nations are in fact recognized, each with their own flags, symbols, histories, and even their own sports teams. It is true that the case of Ireland is ambiguous: there is one national rugby team, founded before the partitioning of the island, and thus representing all of Ireland, and two soccer teams, each representing one part of the island, and reflecting the latter’s partition. Nevertheless, although the United Kingdom did not evolve into a nation-state like France, there has always been a certain British nationalism and a British state that was a unitary actor on the international scene. This British nationalism, however, was in fact an
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English nationalism that imposed itself on the other three nations of the kingdom. England used a variety of mechanisms to achieve this domination, including military conquest, especially in Ireland. But the main method operated through the Acts of Union, especially the union of the Scottish and English monarchies in 1603 and of the parliaments of the two countries in 1707. There was also the assimilation of the Scottish and Welsh elites, attracted by the commercial, military, and economic power of their big neighbour. Although there were tensions between the English and the Scottish and the Welsh in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the latter two nations fully participated in the Industrial Revolution and the imperial expansion of this period, just as those who lived in the French regions did. The Scottish were able to keep their “civil institutions”3 from before the Act of Union of 1707, while the Welsh were able to preserve their language and their version of non-conformist Protestantism. In this way, the peoples of these two nations accepted being part of the bigger British nation, whose empire, marked in red on maps of the world, showed that it covered a good third of the planet. The case with Ireland, however, was completely different. The Act of Union between it and England was imposed after the failure of the 1798 Rebellion, which had been led by dissident Irish Protestants lukewarmly supported by the Irish Catholics (noted for their royalist sympathies). The three nations of Great Britain – England, Scotland, and Wales – adhered to Protestantism, although it took different forms, and this facilitated their identification with the British “nation.” In Ireland, however, only the region around Belfast, which had participated in the Industrial Revolution, identified with the Protestant nations, while the Catholics remained apart. Furthermore, the Great Famine of 1845–50 had alienated the majority of the Irish population from Britain. In Ireland, therefore, it was largely the Protestant community that identified with the adventure of British imperialist nationalism.
The Welfare State: The Culmination of the Nation-State These processes of nation-state building culminated during the period of the Trente Glorieuses (1945–1975) with the construction of the welfare state in both France and the United Kingdom. This was, therefore the final stage of a process that had begun in the eighteenth century with the American and French Revolutions. The coming of
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the welfare state is profoundly associated with the rapid development of market capitalism, which Polanyi has described as the Great Transformation. According to the sociologist Peter Wagner, this transformation had passed through a state of “free” or “wild” capitalism before reaching the stage of “organized” capitalism, the ultimate expression of which was the welfare state, in the twentieth century. Following the theory of Thomas Humphrey Marshall, one can also view the welfare state, in which social rights are added to already existing civic and political rights, as the final step towards liberal democracy. Although the foundations of the welfare state had already been laid earlier in Britain, Sweden, and Germany, its “full” version became possible only after the catastrophes of the Second World War and the subsequent boosting of Western economies under the Marshall Plan and the creation of the European Community. According to Alan Milward (1992), European integration was the salvation of the nation-state, as expressed in the title of his book The European Rescue of the Nation-State. During the period of the Trente Glorieuses, everything was in expansion: the economy, the social rights of citizens, public policy programs, which sought to satisfy new needs, the size of the public administration, and so on. It was taxation that made all of this possible, and during a certain period, after the destruction of the war, almost all political movements and members of all social classes gave their consent to it. This was the period that Colin Crouch (1999) has named the “mid-century consensus.” Great Britain was a good example of this when the Labour Party, following its landslide victory in the 1945 elections, laid the foundations of the welfare state, while the Conservative Party of Harold Macmillan worked on finishing the project until the 1960s. In France, after an initial period when Gaullists and Communists were in government, it was the coalition governments of the moderate left, centrists, and Christian Democrats who did the same. De Gaulle, on his return to power during the first half of the 1960s, followed the same line. It is nevertheless true that the welfare state expressed itself in diverse ways according to the different state traditions that still resonate today (Dyson 1980; Loughlin and Peters 1997). Esping-Andersen (1990) has distinguished three models of “welfare capitalism”: the Swedish model, dominated by a state logic of social democracy; the Anglo-American model, dominated by a logic
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of market pluralism; and the Catholic model, dominated by traditional family values and practised in France. Despite these differences, all welfare states share a common core of ideas and practices, which might be described as a Beveridgian-Keynesian approach to both social and economic policy. In this conception, it is the state that dominates the market and society. At the same time, Western states had to offer an alternative to the Communism of the Soviet Union, which fascinated many Western intellectuals and posed a threat to the West. This was one of the reasons that the United States had supported the reconstruction of Europe through the Marshall Plan. The welfare state may be viewed as the zenith of the nation-state because public policy programs, economic expansion, and notions of citizenship and identity are all conceived from a national perspective. The practice of national sovereignty exercised by national governments has thus found its strongest expression since the nineteenth century. Three historical facts must be elaborated upon before the majority nationalism of this period can be understood. First, the welfare state demanded that the state be bureaucratic and centralized in order to be better able to redistribute its wealth to less privileged individuals, groups, and territories. The central state has not only the right but also the duty to intervene in the social and economic affairs of the nation in order to achieve its policies of expansion and equalization. Second, because of these centralizing and national features, not much importance was placed upon regional, ethnic, cultural, and linguistic minorities, except in the context of national construction. The French Plan imagined by Jean Monnet was primarily a national plan, and even its “regionalization” at the end of the 1950s was introduced from a national perspective. Both regionalist movements in France and minority nationalist movements in Britain made their political demands within the same framework: the autonomy-seeking moderates sought more resources from the central state, while the more radical groups insisted on total independence or the creation of mini-nation-states in Scotland, Wales, Brittany, and Corsica. The response of central governments to these demands was usually a mixture of severe repression and some concessions that did not endanger the sacrosanct unity of the nation-state. In France, however, the Algerian war, which had been waged by the French government in the name of the unity and indivisibility of the Republic, was followed by the granting of independence to Algeria. This cast a serious
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doubt on these principles and stimulated the radicalization of the French regionalist movements. The third important historical aspect of the century was the residual character of the young European Community. In fact, the six member states did not require its existence in order to realize the public policies of the welfare state, and the Community had to abandon its utopian and federalist aims and opted for a simple common market. It is also interesting that the regionalist and nationalist minority movements of this period were, with the exception of some old regionalists and federalists such as the Mouvement pour l’Organisation de la Bretagne or the Sinn Féin of the 1950s, hostile toward the project of European integration, either because it would harm the principle of the nation-state or, for the neo-Marxists, because it was an expression of market capitalism that would marginalize the peripheries. The political context of the time can be seen as a zero-sum game: national sovereignty is indivisible and therefore could not be shared among different levels of government, impenetrable borders, fixed territories, and competing national identities. The creation of the welfare state in Great Britain and France compensated, for a certain time, for the loss of their respective empires, which had been fundamental in the construction of their national identities. The empires had become the Commonwealth and the Communauté française, and their citizens felt like they were participants in an important societal project within their own country that was then projected outwards. With the expansion of the 1950s and 1960s, the countries that had made up the former colonies supplied a cheap workforce that, for a certain time at least, did not put into question either the mid-century consensus or the identities of the native French and British. On the contrary, the presence of the poorly educated and poverty-stricken workers, who performed the most difficult and menial tasks, reinforced the sense of superiority felt by the latter.
The Crises of the Welfare State The capitalist world and its Beveridgian-Keynesian system experienced a series of intermingled crises from the beginning of the 1970s. First, there was an economic crisis at the level of Keynesian macroeconomic policies and Fordist production methods. Then, there was a social crisis with a simultaneous increase in both unemployment and
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inflation, a new phenomenon called at the time “stagflation.” Also involved was a political crisis with regard to the nation-state’s representative functions and its capacity for the efficient delivery of social services. And fourth, following the counterculture movements of the 1960s was a cultural and sociological crisis, in which the values of the traditional patriarchal family were put into question. Despite the definition of the period as the Trente Glorieuses, there were, in fact, both left-wing and right-wing groups that contested the welfare state. Although it was the thinkers of the New Left (the Frankfurt School, for example) that would partly stir the student movements of the 1960s, those who would profit the most from the crisis of the welfare state were the New Right thinkers such as Milton Freeman, F. A. von Hayek, and Walter Niskanen, who inspired the politics now known as the “neo-liberalism” of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. The political and industrial elites of the Western world responded to these crises in two ways: first, through economic globalization, which led to new modes of capitalist production that switched from the standardized Fordist methods of production to ones based on the provision of services and the knowledge economy. This led to a virtual elimination of national boundaries, as well as the adoption of neo-liberalism. Related to this process was the relaunching of the process of European integration and the Single Market project of Jacques Delors. These economic and political crises led also to the transformation of value systems and the challenges of the 1960s and 1970s, which would profoundly change Western societies. Among these challenges was feminism, which radically questioned the traditional nuclear family, the new individualism of the “me” generation, and new social movements that began to modify the forms of collective mobilization. And finally, the collapse of the USSR and the communist states profoundly changed the geopolitical situation of the entire world and threw into doubt the old ideological certitudes of the socialist and Marxist left.
The Transformations of the State and Majority Nationalism The political, economic, cultural, and geostrategic transformations profoundly modified the situation of the nation-states and gave rise to terms such as “post-national,” “beyond the nation-state,” and “the hollow state.” They also led to what can be termed “endism”:
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Fukuyama’s The End of History (1992), Bertrand Badie’s The End of Territories (1995), and Kenichi Ohmae’s The End of the NationState (1995), to name just a few works of the period. Although these works seriously doubted the survival of the nation-state, it is certainly too early to write its obituary notice; undoubtedly, it still exists, but in a transformed manner. Its sovereignty has been relativized (especially in the countries of the European Union, where many of its competences have been transferred to the EU institutions and where in many areas EU law now prevails over national law); its borders are now more open and permeable; its territory is less easily identifiable; its domination over the market and society is less definite; and the identities of its citizens are more complex. The ideology of nationalism is less clear. Without assuming a position of neo-medievalism, one can see that there has been a resurgence of old forms of political and administrative organization. The notion of sovereignty, for example, which, in the classical system of the nation-state was indivisible and whole, is today much more complex; contemporary jurists like Neil Walker (1998) speak about orders of “overlapping sovereignty,” evoking images of the pre-nationstate period. It must be asked whether we have entered the phase of post-modernity (and, if we have, whether we must protect the heritage of the Enlightenment, or, more specifically, Reason), or whether we have entered a new stage of modernity (Touraine 1995). Furthermore, regions and cities are once again prominent political actors on the redefined and widened stage of the new Europe, recalling their position before the arrival of the nation-state. At the same time, this does not mean the arrival of the old federalist dream of a “Europe of Regions” (Loughlin 1996, 2004). We can summarize this debate by saying that the nation-state still exists today but in a transformed manner, and alongside other (both infra-national and supra-national) forms of organization. The consequences of these transformations for British and French majority nationalisms have been far-reaching. In a globalized world dominated by the United States after the collapse of the Soviet Union and especially after 9/11, Great Britain and France have been reduced to two medium-sized states in an increasingly integrated Europe in search of a new role on the international stage. France has had aspirations to dominate Europe, but this has become less and less likely, especially with the arrival of the United Kingdom in 1973 and the accession of Sweden and Finland in 1995. Moreover, the
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unification of Germany in 1989 has rendered the Franco-German alliance more problematic – an alliance that had previously allowed the French to dominate the European scene. The war in Iraq made the new members of the European Union from Eastern and Central Europe more sympathetic to the opinions and power of the US-UK axis than to those of “old Europe,” particularly France. Even the French language, once the language of diplomatic relations, has seen its prominence lost to (American) English. Somewhat similarly, the United Kingdom has also lost its former towering influence in international affairs and has had to decide if it identifies more with Europe or with the Atlantic Alliance. In a world radically different from the world of forty years ago, the “majority” nationalisms of France and Britain have been obliged to redefine their positions, organizational politics, and national identities. In France, during the presidencies of De Gaulle, Pompidou, and Giscard d’Estaing, there was an attempt to preserve the Jacobin heritage of the state, even if towards the end of his career De Gaulle tried to introduce some modest reforms of the regions (but the referendum to introduce these reforms failed because it was also linked to a reform of the senate, and the senators managed to persuade the French electorate to vote against it). In the United Kingdom from 1945 until the 1990s, both Labour and Conservative governments emphasized centralization and reduced the powers of sub-national governments. But since the 1980s in France and the 1990s in the United Kingdom, both countries have introduced important reforms called decentralization in France and devolution in the United Kingdom. Justifying the decentralization reforms in 1982, François Mitterrand stated that France had embraced a new definition of the Republic’s unity, which could now be defined as a pluralist one that embraces diversity. The 1982 decentralization reforms in France had two principal objectives. First, they reinforced the position of the communes, especially the large and medium-sized towns. Second, they created a new institution, the “political” region with a directly elected regional council. Hundreds of articles and books have been written in recent years describing and analyzing these reforms, and it would not be easy to summarize these debates in the space available here. It will suffice to say that the French decentralization reforms have profoundly modified the politico-administrative landscape of the country and continue to do so. The reforms have gone through two
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phases. The first phase, from 1982 to about 1986, was characterized by intensive legislative activity that created new political actors and profoundly modified the institutional framework in which they operate. The second phase (called in French “décentralisation Acte II”) began around the mid-1990s and aimed at completing the previous reforms. This second phase took place in a very different political context, which was globalization and a much more integrated Europe. Both France and Britain, therefore, now find themselves in a rapidly changing Europe and are confronted by many new social challenges. France has had to cope with serious urban unrest, which is in large measure a consequence of the alienation of the secondand third-generation immigrant youth whose assimilation into the national society has not been successful. In order to cope with these urban problems, as well as with the more general changes in urban realities, the French government has been experimenting with new forms of urban institutions from the grouping together of communes through intercommunal associations to setting up neighbourhood councils within the larger communes. Furthermore, the relations between the central state and subnational authorities have also changed and are now based on contractual partnerships. As part of this new conceptualization of territorial organization, the Jospin government even became engaged in 1998 in a peace process in Corsica, partly inspired by the Northern Ireland Peace Process and partly by the model of European governance (Loughlin and Olivesi 1999). This led to some modest proposals to allow Corsica to adapt national legislation to the island’s circumstances. Matignon’s wish to provide Corsica with the possibility of modifying its legislation led to a division within the political class between what we might call the Jacobin and the neo-Girondin factions, those who, respectively, favoured decentralization and regionalization and those who, like Jean-Pierre Chevènement, opposed them in the name of national sovereignty. The same groups argue for or against continued European integration. In France, there has been a radical change in political discourse around French majority or minority nationalism. Without renouncing the importance of the French nation, a part of the supporters of majority nationalism are today open to the existence of minority nationalisms and hope to arrive at a historical compromise with them. This is the main lesson to be learned from the Corsican peace
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process. The protagonists of minority nationalism, on their side, redefined their political projects in a more European framework, having taken the new French realities into account. On the other hand, the failure of the Corsican peace process to be approved by a referendum held on the island (the No votes won by a small margin) illustrates that the general public is for the moment deeply divided on the issue. One finds similar developments in the United Kingdom. For the New Labour Party of Tony Blair, “devolution,” or “political decentralization,” has been a way of facing up to the new European and global challenges and redefining the place of the nations and regions that constitute the Kingdom. The Scottish and Welsh nations have been granted political and democratic institutions – the Scottish Parliament and the National Assembly for Wales – that had previously been only administrative. In turn, Welsh and Scottish nationalist movements have cooperated with political authorities without relinquishing their projects for independence and today speak of “independence in Europe.” The new global and European context have allowed the British to redefine the concept of sovereignty, and this has allowed them along with the Irish government and the protagonists of the Northern Ireland conflict to find a solution. Even if the dispositions of the Belfast Good Friday Agreement have not fully been put into effect, the agreement has completely modified the parameters of the conflict and, at the very least, silenced the weapons. The devolution reforms and the Good Friday Agreement mean a redefinition of national identity in the United Kingdom. Today, Scottish and Welsh identities are stronger than the British within these two nations, and in England there is a growing English identity. What has also changed is the old system of standardization and uniformity that characterized the old welfare state. There is today an acceptance of a certain degree of asymmetry. In France, this is expressed through the “right to experimentation,” which will allow local authorities to develop new types of public policy and new institutional arrangements. This is also the case in the United Kingdom, where divergences and variations on the level of public policies and institutions also exist. The new institutions in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland have also led to asymmetrical political institutions. Within England (as opposed to the rest of the United Kingdom), there now exist three systems of local government. In both France
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and the United Kingdom, the state is no longer the over-bearing directive state of previous periods but, rather, one that encourages political actors in a bottom-up way to embark on cooperative projects. In the United Kingdom, affairs between different levels of authority are determined by “gentlemen’s agreements.” In France, these are more formalized through contractual arrangements. So, amidst all these transformations, can the word “nationalism” still be used? We might say that national identity is still able to maintain the loyalty of a nation’s citizens. This identity is especially visible on the level of sports but also, unfortunately, on the occasion of war, like that in the Falkland Islands in 1982. Surveys like those of the Eurobarometer have shown that national identity is the strongest of all identities. In England, especially, though less in Scotland and Wales, this manifests itself in a negative way, for example in resistance to the idea of a unified Europe or to the adoption of the euro currency. But national identity is more complex than before, and today we are aware that several identities can co-exist alongside each other. Again, survey material illustrates that the Scots and the Welsh feel both British as well as Scottish and Welsh but the combination of the two identities can vary. Majorities in both these nations feel more Scottish and Welsh than British, and the Scots feel more Scottish than the Welsh feel Welsh. In England, there is also a dual identity, but this time the majority of English people see themselves as British rather than English, although the feeling of Englishness is growing, as is evident from the number of English flags (a red cross on a white field) in England proper. To some extent, this new English nationalism is a reaction to the strengthening of Scottish and Welsh identities following devolution. In conclusion, it might be said that the transformations of the past thirty years have profoundly modified the very foundations of the nation-state, which has been the basis of modern political organization and thought for the past two hundred years. This implies that the notions of majority and minority nationalisms themselves have to be recast to take account of the greater complexity of the contemporary period and the intermingling of several different national phenomena. In light of what has been discussed here, the reactions of old “sovereignist” nationalists, like Margaret Thatcher and JeanPierre Chevènement, are perhaps the last motions of a political class that belongs to the past. The future is one of a renewed and open nationalism still capable of rooting the identity of its citizens.
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notes 1 Translator’s note: Must the Nation Be Defended? 2 The “first” United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was established in 1801, following an Act of Union of Great Britain (England, Scotland, and Wales) in 1800. The actual United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland was formed in 1921 following the War of Independence (1916–21), which had resulted in partial independence in the southern part of Ireland with the partitioning of the island by the British government. 3 Scottish scholars refer in this way to those institutions that Scotland retained after the Act of Union – the Established Church (which is Calvinist and not Anglican, as in England), Roman law, a distinct educational system, an autonomous financial system, and so on.
7 Janus Faces, Rocks, and Hard Places: Majority Nationalism in Canada James Bickerton In his renowned study of nationalism, Benedict Anderson begins by admitting that the subject matter of his book is notoriously hard to define. His interpretation is that a nation is an imagined political community, one both inherently limited and sovereign. However, whereas Ernest Gellner said of nationalism that it is able to invent nations even where they do not exist, Anderson (1983, 6) asserts that the process of nation-creating is not so much one of false fabrication as it is one of active creation: in a sense there are no “true” communities that can be juxtaposed to “false,” or invented, nations; all communities are products of the human imagination. “Communities are distinguished not by their degree of falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.” As a style of imagining, nationalism emerged during the age of the Enlightenment and revolution, which destroyed the legitimacy of any form of political community that was not “free” in the sense of being self-determined and self-governed, linking nationalism inextricably with the idea of sovereignty (Anderson 1983, 7). Philosophers have long found the concepts of nation and nationalism to be frustratingly empty, concluding, as Gertrude Stein famously did of Oakland, that “there is no there, there” (Anderson 1983, 5). Yet despite this disparagement, as well as repeated prophecies that the end of the era of nationalism was nigh, “nation-ness remains the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time” (3). Indeed, contemporary nationalism has not only persisted but grown in diversity. Modernization, often thought to be the source of nationalism’s inevitable demise, has proved to be a Janus-faced
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phenomenon for nations. On the one hand, it has unleashed forces of cultural homogenization and economic globalization that seem likely to constrain or even reverse the extent of national diversity and autonomy; on the other, “it has enhanced the capacity and will of small nationalities to construct more autonomous political spaces for themselves” (Whitaker 2004, 37). Nationalism`s historical legacy is Janus-faced in another sense. One of its faces is that of a top-down, instrumental phenomena: a conscious, self-protective policy, intimately linked to the interests of those who govern and their regimes (in other words, something emanating from the state and functional for the preservation of the state). This leads states (or sub-states, when under the control of minority nations) to continually engage in nation-creating and nation-building processes, which includes the establishment, maintenance, and renewal of a range of social institutions and practices. In this way, nations are social constructions, “created, reinvented and transformed all the time” (Keating 2001d, 44). “To freeze these at any point in time is in contradiction to the evolving nature of national identities” (Keating 2001a, 167). The other face of nationalism is its affective and subjective dimension, the sense of belonging and identification that individuals feel for the “imagined communities” to which they believe themselves to belong. In the modern age, nationality has been one of the most important of the multiple identities individuals assume or construct for themselves, but its character and intensity varies between individuals, across national communities, and over time, depending upon a host of factors. This variation in nationalities and nationalisms across space and time, and its implications for the study of polities, has stimulated a number of scholars of comparative politics to explore and seek to understand the various dimensions of nationality in divided societies. An important aspect of the politics of such societies is the range of responses exhibited by majority nationalities toward unassimilated minority nations. The concept of “majority nationality” connotes that the nationalism of the majority population in divided societies and the state over which this population ostensibly holds sway will orient itself in some discernible fashion toward the claims and demands of internal minority nations that constitute an alternate (though not necessarily alternative) pole of allegiance and political identity within the larger overarching national community.
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In this connection, David Miller refers to “rival” and “nested” nationalities and Michael Keating to “competitive,” “nested,” and “co-existing” nationalities. Both authors attempt to transcend exclusivist notions of nationality that assume individuals possess only one national identity or feel attachment and give allegiance to only one nation. According to Miller, rival, or competitive, national identities are mutually exclusive in that they make competing claims to all or part of the territory of the state, as well as the identities and loyalties of its residents, in a manner that undermines, contests, or negates the legitimacy of the claims of the other nationality. National identities tend to become more exclusive during times of threat, crisis, or political polarization, typically increasing for minority nations the appeal of secession, border re-drawings, or confederal models of power sharing; and for majority nations, tending to “close down” their openness to the claims and demands of minority nations. Outside these periods, however, individuals tend to be much more flexible than this, able to comfortably assume without contradiction multiple national identities. Nested national identities refers to situations where two or more territorially based national communities exist within the framework of a single nation, such that one (or both, but typically one) of the national communities takes on a split, or dual, national identity: that of the minority nation, as well as the inclusive national identity of the majority (Miller 2001, 304). Asymmetrical identities are therefore common in such situations, where members of minority nations assume and exhibit a dual nationality, while the majority population adheres to only one overarching and inclusivist nationality (Keating 2001a, 313). In such cases the intensity of national feeling or identification and the degree of loyalty or allegiance are also likely to be asymmetrical. The main point is that different national identities can exist at more than one level within a state and coexist within individuals, allowing for their mutual accommodation through federal or quasi-federal arrangements (Miller 2001, 306; Keating 2001a, 46). This non-exclusivity of nationality speaks to the human capacity and proclivity for living with multiple identities and in the case of national identities in particular, their ability to compartmentalize these identities such that they can be sustained simultaneously (Cairns 1999, 46–7).
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Keating argues that plurinationalism is the best concept for capturing the complexity of multiple national identities in countries with significant minority nations. Unlike multinationalism, which conceives of the existence of discrete nations within a given state (thereby recommending a multinational federation as the appropriate state form), plurinationalism encompasses the very asymmetries of national identities themselves: where there is a minority nation there is not always a majority. In Canada, most Canadians outside Quebec do not recognize themselves as a nation apart or a unitary actor or discrete collectivity. While minority nations might imagine their adversary as a unitary actor (for example, “English Canada”), this involves “stretching reality to try and forge a symmetry that does not exist” (Keating 2001d, 109). This chapter will argue that the character of Canada’s majority nationality has changed over time, influenced and shaped by events, changes in demography, long-term social and economic processes, and the emergence of minority national movements. These changes have produced successive and overlapping forms of Canadian nationalism that correspond to different majority orientations toward the nationhood claims of Québécois and Aboriginal minorities. The first of these derives chiefly from an orientation that rests on a pluralistic but uninational concept of Canada embodied in the core ideas of bilingualism, multiculturalism, a strong central government, and a constitutionally entrenched Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This understanding of Canadian nationality has been challenged by a multinational understanding of Canada that embraces various forms of political and constitutional asymmetry as the only solution to Canada’s nationalities question short of Quebec’s secession and the only legitimate way to recognize and accommodate minority nations (Québécois and Indigenous). A third perspective – one both pluralistic and plurinational – has emerged tentatively out of the intellectual and political clash of the first two, combining elements of each by simultaneously embracing the idea of one inclusive nation and distinct minority nations or nationalities, which only periodically and under certain conditions manifest themselves as rival or contradictory nationalisms. It is this third form of Canadian nationalism that, it is argued here, offers the most promising basis for constructing a viable and lasting accommodation and reconciliation between and within Canada’s various national communities.
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From British-Canadian to Canadian Nationalism The early roots and manifestations of British Canadian nationalism amongst Canada’s English-speaking majority are well-known, the well-trodden thematic territory of many Canadian historians and analysts of Canadian politics. Ethnic ties and psychological attachment to the British connection, combined with strong cultural, political, and economic ties to the British Empire, virtually ensured that this would be the case. At least up to the post-First World War period, a shared identity linked to their “Britishness,” along with a sense of attachment and loyalty to the British Empire and its institutions (including the monarchy), was a strong and pervasive characteristic of in-group patriotic feeling amongst English-speaking Canadians. Their “imagined community” stretched beyond the boundaries of Canada while in important ways excluding a significant minority within those boundaries.1 “The past is another country” seems an apt phrase when applied to this early form of English-Canadian nationalism. Still, this shared British Canadian nationality was no doubt essential to holding together a far-flung and thinly populated and otherwise fractious and balkanized, elite-brokered federation of former British North American colonies. It was the social and ideological glue that provided the basis for the political mobilization of Englishspeaking Canadians in support of grand national undertakings, whether these be long-term, state-initiated projects such as the “national policy” – which sought to spur national development through railway construction, protective tariffs, and Western settlement – or the need to sustain the extensive centralization, cooperation, and social sacrifices necessitated by Canada’s participation in major military conflicts. A seemingly inherent corollary of Britishness in the national identity and institutions of English-speaking Canadians was a profound distrust and wariness of the United States and distaste – for some a visceral dislike – for American political institutions and culture. Against this Canada’s national purpose was portrayed – at least in part – as sustaining an outpost of British culture in North America, echoing the French Canadian ideology of la survivance – sustaining French Canada as a North American bastion of Catholicism and the French language (Monière 1981). In this connection, the continentalist ambitions of the United States were for the most part an
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indisputable fact and an ever-present concern. While the fear of overt military aggression waned in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the threat of a gradual American “takeover” through economic and cultural assimilation continued to sustain nationalist rhetoric and policies in Canada well into the twentieth century. The flip side of British Canada’s defensive attachment to British culture and institutions and to the British Empire as an overarching political framework for Canada, was the alternately exclusionist, assimilationist, and sometimes repressive face – the unadorned majoritarian face – it sometimes presented to the French Canadian minority. This involved restricting or banning the use of the French language in schools and other institutions (as all provinces outside Quebec did), limiting the role of French Canadians within the dominion/ federal government, ignoring or minimally recognizing the Frenchspeaking minority in the country’s national myths and symbols, or using their majority position to override the strong resistance and objections of French Canada to certain national policies or key decisions (for instance, on such matters as conscription). These were aspects of British Canadian nationalism that long after would leave a residue of collective national guilt within English-speaking Canada, while generating a legacy of grievance and resentment within Frenchspeaking Canada – especially amongst French-speaking Quebecers. With the political, economic, and cultural influence of Britain on English-speaking Canada beginning to wane after the First World War, an indigenous Canadian tradition and identity began to assert itself. This “colony to nation” process was compressed by the demands and exigencies placed on both countries by the severe and prolonged depression years of the 1930s and even moreso by the Second World War. A key factor in precipitating this change was the apparent incapacity of the decentralized Canadian federation (as it was structured in the interwar period) to respond effectively to the challenges posed by the Depression, leading to the to the appointment of the Royal Commission on Dominion-Provincial Relations (the Rowell-Sirois Commission, 1937–40). The gradual implementation of the commission’s recommendations represents a historic watershed not only in the character of the relationship between governments in Canada but also in the prevailing vision and conception of the national community and the presumed bases of Canadian citizenship, guiding and motivating the Canadian government. The intent of the recommendations was to stimulate national integration
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through greater national sharing and equalization, made possible by a much more prominent role for the federal government (Bradford 1999: 541–64).2 By the end of the Second World War, Canada’s economic, political, cultural, and military ties to the United States had been greatly strengthened, while in all these areas Britain’s role and influence faded dramatically. In the ensuing postwar years, the public philosophy and programmatic ideas of the Rowell-Sirois Commission “had become a federal governing paradigm” (Bradford 1999, 552). At the same time, the ethno-centric, exclusionist, assimilationist, and majoritarian tendencies of British Canadian nationalism gave way to a more open and pluralistic variety of Canadian nationalism, civic or political in character. This new nationalism of the majority focused primarily on the Canadian state and legitimized federal action in a wide variety of areas (McRoberts 1997, 37–8). By the end of the 1950s, Canadian intellectuals were registering this shift in the character of the Canadian nationality. Prominent historian W.L. Morton (as quoted in Cook 1986, 140) argued that there was no “Canadian way of life, much less two, but a unity under the Crown admitting a thousand diversities”; similarly, historian Kenneth McNaught (as quoted in Russell 1966, 368) extolled a pragmatic indigenous tradition that had come to reject “a narrowly ethnic conception of Canada, be it in the form of an exclusively Anglo-Saxon nation or a bi-cultural partnership.” By the mid-1960s, one general survey of opinion of English-speaking Canadian scholars could suggest broad agreement on multiculturalism as a key element of Canadian identity and nationality and repudiation of any form of nationalism that insisted on a homogeneous cultural basis for the Canadian nation. “They [English-speaking Canadian scholars] are all pluralists in that they accept multiculturalism as a fundamental axiom of Canadian nationhood” (Russell 1966, 370).
Modern Canadian Nationalism: A Just Society and Pluralistic Nationality By the 1960s, most of the elements of a new Canadian nationality and nationalism were present, though the situation in that tumultuous decade was still very much in flux. The general contours of this new Canadian nationalism were being actively shaped by at least four intersecting influences: the conditioning effect on the Canadian
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state and its citizens of changing global norms and rules, especially with regard to decolonization; the broad and pervasive influence – economic, political, social, and cultural – of the United States; the construction of a Canadian welfare state through the expansion and consolidation of a network of national social programs; and last, though certainly not least, the rise of, and encounter with Quebec nationalism. The first of the aforementioned factors shaping the new Canada was the postwar demise of empires, the success of liberation and decolonization movements, and in general the de-legitimizing of imperialism and racism in the international system. This not only led to a spate of new third world states that were former colonies, it also had an important effect on domestic politics in Canada and elsewhere. In 1960 the United Nations passed Resolution 1514, stating the right of all peoples to self-determination. In the same year, the Canadian Bill of Rights was enacted, the cherished project of Conservative prime minister John Diefenbaker. The Bill of Rights signified a growing recognition that there should be some explicit acknowledgement and legal entrenchment of already widely accepted and well-established individual rights. In the same year, 1960, the historic wrong of denying status Indians the right to vote was overturned with the belated extension to them of this basic right of citizenship. Over the next several years, Canadian immigration policy “moved decisively toward universalistic criteria, as senior immigration officials realized that ‘Canada could not operate effectively in the United Nations, or in the multiracial Commonwealth, with the millstone of a racially discriminatory immigration policy round her neck’” (Cairns 1999, 34). Canadian support for these changes in both the international and the domestic spheres made it increasingly difficult to defend or retain either government policies or popular attitudes that were ethno-centric or racist.3 Undoubtedly, some of this increased attention to citizen rights in Canada also resulted from a spillover effect from the building momentum in the 1960s of the civil rights movement in the United States. Developments there not only increased the media focus on the issue of equal rights for every citizen but highlighted societal and political differences between Canada and the United States, particularly on questions of race and ethnicity. This awakened in Canadians a sharpened sense of their cultural and political differences with their American neighbours that perhaps had abated somewhat
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during the grey conformism and political quietism of the 1950s. This re-awakened sense of national difference and also of divergent national interests was intensified and magnified by spreading opposition to the escalating American military intervention in Vietnam. The effect on Canadian attitudes, self-image, and national identity of American social problems, domestic politics, and foreign policy was filtered through and magnified by growing nationalist concerns in Canada about the pervasive American presence in the Canadian economy. For some, this strain of economic nationalism within English-speaking Canada represents nothing less than the core of Canadian nationalism. Bashevkin (1991, 25, 28) for instance, adopts this view in her study of Canadian nationalism, while acknowledging that this economic focus represented a rather narrow basis and ‘thin gruel’ for nationalist sentiment. “The ability of this perspective to differentiate between Canadians and Americans and to generate a convincing sense of ‘Canadianess’ has been problematic.” This was especially true because of the dissipation of English Canada’s own Tory tradition and values, much to the chagrin and lamentation of Conservative thinkers such as Donald Creighton and George Grant (1970), who argued that cultural convergence with the United States bode ill for Canadian independence. Still, nationalist economic concerns did lend intellectual support to a centralist and interventionist political agenda, as well as the philosophical and political underpinning for a number of left-nationalist policy initiatives in the 1970s. However, as noted by Bashevkin (1991, 26), the left-nationalist vision of federal supremacy and authority would be increasingly at odds “with the decentralist reality of Confederation in the late twentieth century.” More important ultimately than economic nationalism to Canadian national identity was the construction of a system of national social programs under the leadership of the federal government. Federal transfers to the provinces for fiscal equalization and for the establishment of national social programs in health care, education, social assistance, and pensions, among other initiatives, created the foundations of Canadian social citizenship and the basis for regional equity, if not provincial equality. The most important of these programs – and for some the very notion of a national welfare state constructed and defended by the federal government – became closely associated with what it meant to be Canadian (in other words, with Canadian identity and nationality), leading either to their
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constitutional entrenchment, as with equalization in 1982, or to their elevation in both public consciousness and federal legislation to something approaching iconic status, as with Canada’s system of public health care.4 While the construction of the Canadian welfare state contributed significantly and importantly to the “thickening” of Canadian citizenship and identity, it brought the federal government into direct and sometimes intense conflict with the province of Quebec. This was clearly the case even before the onset of the Quiet Revolution. The latter development, however, triggered by the rise of a new secular nationalism centred on the Quebec state, generated a determined campaign for the reform and redesign of Confederation and Quebec’s place within it; it also helped to spawn an independence movement that constituted a direct threat to Canada’s territorial integrity, and for a time, a perceived threat to its national security.5 The Canadian government clearly was thrown off balance by events in Quebec, and initially its response was confused and unsure as it struggled to develop a coherent posture to adopt towards the province’s demands for more provincial powers, special constitutional status, and rolling back federal intervention and intrusion into Quebec jurisdiction. Back in power in 1963 after a six-year hiatus, Lester Pearson’s new Liberal government appointed a Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (the B &B, or Laurendeau-Dunton Commission) with a mandate to recommend a new framework for developing Confederation on the basis of equal partnership between the two founding races (French and English), “taking into account the contribution made by other ethnic groups to the cultural enrichment of Canada” (McRoberts 1999, 120). In the interim, while awaiting the commission’s final report (not submitted until 1968), a number of contracting-out arrangements were made with Quebec, allowing the province sufficient autonomy to establish its own provincially designed and run social programs, rather than the national programs Ottawa was negotiating and implementing with the other nine provinces.6 During this period (in the mid-1960s) there were indications that federal political leaders were willing to consider political and constitutional recognition of some kind of special status for Quebec based on its status as a “nation within a nation” (Pearson as quoted by McRoberts 1999, 120). This apparent openness to Quebec’s nation claims, however, was relatively short-lived, coming to an end with
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the adoption of an alternative vision of French-English and federalprovincial relations, one most forcefully articulated by Pierre Elliott Trudeau, elected to the federal Parliament in 1965, appointed justice minister in 1967, and elected the following year as the Liberal Party’s new leader and soon thereafter as prime minister (a position he would hold for fifteen years, with one brief interruption). Trudeau believed that recognizing the claims of Quebec nationalists would only strengthen the forces of Quebec separatism and that the attraction of both for French-speaking Quebecers could be tempered and even undermined by a series of measures that incorporated French Canadians and Quebec into a pan-Canadian perspective. These measures – the centerpiece of which was official bilingualism – would require a much more thoroughgoing recognition and acceptance of French-English duality in the Canadian federation, but within the context of individual rights (including language rights) and provincial equality (McRoberts 1999, 122–3). When the Report of the B &B Commission was finally submitted, “it made clear that any solution had to recognize in a substantive way Quebec’s distinctiveness and its claims for greater autonomy within the federation.” At a minimum, this meant positive measures to expand employment opportunities for Francophones in the federal public sector and in Quebec’s private sector. Specific recommendations included official bilingualism within the federal government, featuring concerted action for rapid Francophone career advancement and organizational innovations to nurture both Francophone and Anglophone work cultures; positive steps to reverse the inferiority of French and francophones in the Quebec economy; expanded services in both official languages in radio, television, and education; and declarations of official bilingualism by the provinces of Ontario and New Brunswick (Bradford 1999, 553). Though Ontario has never adopted official bilingualism for itself, all the other major recommendations were implemented by the Trudeau government, as well as successive Quebec governments, with one major qualification: the federal government never accepted the philosophy that Canada was comprised of two nations or peoples and that Confederation was or should be constituted as an “equal partnership between distinct societies.” This overarching vision was discarded in favour of formal equality between language groups, while the idea of biculturalism was replaced with a policy of multiculturalism. Furthermore, the protection of language rights for
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individuals within a new Charter of Rights would be the federal government’s first objective in any revision of the Canadian Constitution. As to the question of additional powers for the province of Quebec, Trudeau insisted on the principle of equality among the provinces (McRoberts 1999, 123). In the 1960s Canadians were being challenged externally by the decline of Britain as a point of reference and by evidence of a looming American economic and cultural hegemony rapidly filling the void. Internally, a swelling tide of Quebec nationalism was forcing the pace of rethinking and re-imagining Canadian national identity. Trudeau’s vision of the Canadian nation was embraced because he built on pre-existing elements of Canadian nationality, consolidating and integrating key ideational elements and fundamental values into a coherent public philosophy and governing paradigm at a time when Canadians were in dire need of a renewed sense of their own national identity. Also important was that his national vision and political philosophy responded directly to the conditions and challenges, both external and internal, shaping and influencing Canadian attitudes and values during that period. During the 1970s the various elements of this new paradigm – a key role for the federal government as a partner with provinces and a guarantor of national social programs, official bilingualism and a policy of multiculturalism within this linguistic framework, and the formal equality of the provinces – became entrenched through the establishment of institutions and programs and through the elaboration of competing visions and philosophies of Canadian federalism hammered out in the forge of federal-provincial relations and the escalating clash of competing nation-building projects. This was particularly the case during the latter half of the 1970s, when a rising tide of Quebec nationalism and province-led regionalism was extant in the country. Thus, although in 1971 the Western provinces had agreed to an amending formula that included a veto for Quebec and Ontario, at a meeting of provinces in 1975 this special treatment for the large provinces was no longer deemed acceptable; instead, the principle of equality among all provinces was declared (McRoberts 1997, 185). The following year Quebecers elected René Lévesque and the Parti Québécois to power, setting the wheels in motion for a referendum on whether the government of Quebec should negotiate a “sovereignty association” arrangement with Canada.
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This vigorous constitutional dialogue between governments gradually drew in other societal interests who were beginning to perceive a stake of their own in the question of constitutional reform. What had been strictly a matter of intergovernmental relations became a competitive exercise in societal engagement as governments sought to win over the hearts and minds of individual Canadians and Quebecers before, during, and in the wake of the first Quebec referendum campaign in 1980 (Cairns 1977, 695–725; Banting and Simeon 1983). It also clarified and “filled out” the contending national visions and nationalisms vying for the support and adherence of Canadians and Quebecers.
Charter Federalism, Populist Constitutionalism, and Rival Nationalisms Many issues were at stake in the constitutional negotiations and popular consultation that followed the 1980 Quebec referendum, including the division of powers between governments, reform of national political institutions, and the design of an amending formula to govern future constitutional change. But virtually the only matter that drew the focused attention, popular participation, and eventual widespread support of both public interest groups and individual Canadians was the final form and content of the centerpiece of Trudeau’s national vision: a Charter that would provide constitutional protection for individual freedoms and rights, including language rights (Simeon 1980; Banting and Simeon 1983). The political debates and developments of this period in Canadian and Quebec history are well known, though differences of interpretation continue. Worthy of note here is that the constitutional changes that were implemented in 1982 and the processes of constitutional reform (both pre- and post-1982) had a profound impact on the substance and intensity of identity politics in Canada and on citizenstate relations. It is generally agreed that the 1982 constitutional package that ultimately prevailed with the support of nine provinces over the opposition of Quebec conformed quite closely to the preferences and national vision of the Trudeau government. Thus, the amending formula in the agreement gave no single province a veto over constitutional change.7 Nor were the powers of the federal government diminished in the 1982 constitutional reform. The existing federal division of powers, an ineffectual Senate,
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and a federal-government-dominated appointments process (including appointments to the Senate and the greatly empowered Supreme Court) remained essentially unaltered (Gibbins 2004, 127–44). Without doubt the core elements of Trudeau’s national vision were embodied in the new Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Charter included legal protection for an array of individual rights (fundamental freedoms, democratic, legal, mobility and equality rights). It also committed the governments of Canada and the provinces to uphold the principles of official bilingualism, minority language education rights, and multiculturalism. It did not recognize Quebec as possessing a status distinct or different from the other provinces. Many citizen advocacy groups, especially the so-called identity communities, had been mobilized during the public hearings process on constitutional reform, and the vast majority of these were concerned almost exclusively with the proposed Charter of Rights. There is no doubt that from its inception the Charter – and even more so over the years since its entrenchment – “had a profound effect upon English-Canadian political culture.” It gave these Canadians a sense of “constitutional proprietorship” and quickly became “a powerful new focus of Canadian nationalism” (McRoberts 1999, 124). As argued by scholars such as Samuel LaSelva (1996) and Alan Cairns (1995, 186–93), federalism – premised on territorially based majoritarianism in both province and country – was a necessary but not sufficient constitutional basis for a modern, democratic Canada. A bill of rights was required in order to provide individuals and groups with recognition and to place their interests on the same footing as other constitutional actors. The individualism and egalitarianism embodied by the Charter and strongly supported and identified with by English-speaking Canadians stands in contrast to the dramatic recognition in the 1982 reform – both symbolic and substantive in character – of the special place and rights of Aboriginal peoples.8 Before then, Canada’s indigenous peoples had been all but absent from constitutional discussions, reflecting their extreme marginalization in Canadian political life. Indeed, reflecting upon the attitude of the majority toward Canada’s national minorities – their willingness to recognize and include the minority nationalities – the historical contrast between the experience of Aboriginal and French Canadians is quite dramatic. Certainly the latter experienced various forms of political and economic oppression and cultural imperialism at the hands of the
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English-speaking majority. But their winning of political rights and full citizenship status in the nineteenth century, along with their control of a large and powerful province, ensured that French-speaking Canadians would have an important and often central role creating and governing the Canadian state, its social and economic development, and in general the unfolding of Canadian history. In contrast, Aboriginals existed as subject peoples, dominated, impoverished, and without the basic rights of citizenship. Their struggles for recognition as rights-bearing peoples and inclusion as such within Canada’s constitutional framework began in earnest only with their successful opposition to the federal government’s 1969 White Paper on Indians, which proposed the revoking of treaties, the dismantling of reserves, and full assimilation of natives into the general population (Cairns 2000). The political mobilization of indigenous peoples and the articulation of an Aboriginal or indigenous peoples’ nationalism have continued in the decades since, provoking over time a re-thinking of majority-minority relations on the part of both Canadians and Quebecers, and affecting the character of each of their nationalisms, as well as the relationship between them. The clash of nationalisms in Canada – Canadian, Québécois, Aboriginal – and the potential for their contradictions to produce a situation of mutual frustration, political stalemate, and a turn toward exclusive or sealed identities became evident during the churn of events in the 1988–93 period. The 1982 constitutional reform was followed by two major initiatives toward Canada’s minority nations: a constitutionally mandated series of First Ministers’ meetings with Aboriginal leaders seeking to define and reach agreement on Aboriginal rights and self-government and negotiation of a new constitutional accord that would satisfy the minimalist, bottom-line demands of a new Liberal provincial government in Quebec. The first ended in abject failure: several dissenting provinces nixed key elements of various proposed deals. The second achieved initial success with the striking of a unanimous intergovernmental agreement. However, the 1987 Meech Lake Accord came hard on the heels of the failed attempts to accommodate Aboriginal nationalism, creating tensions and resentment over the starkly divergent outcomes of high-level constitutional negotiations. The opposition of Aboriginal leaders to a separate settlement with Quebec became a crucial factor in the demise of the accord in 1990, following native MLA Elijah Harper’s refusal to grant his required assent in order to allow the
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Manitoba legislature to cast its vote on the re-negotiated final version of the accord within the constitutionally specified time limits (McRoberts and Monahan 1993). The clash of minority nationalisms was evident as well in the tense stand-off between native “warriors” and Quebec provincial police at Oka, Quebec, in the summer of 1990. The bitter recriminations that followed on both sides raised difficult questions about the place of indigenous First Nations within the Quebec nation, about their role and status in future referenda and/or constitutional negotiations, about contending claims of ownership and sovereignty over Quebec territory, and about the general attitude and orientation of the Quebecois majority (in John Coakley’s terms, the degree of recognition they were willing to extend and their strategic response, in terms of inclusiveness) toward Quebec’s own internal national minorities. In the years since Oka, nationalist thinkers in Quebec and political party actors have become more sensitive to and accommodative of the differential status and nationhood claims of Quebec’s indigenous peoples. This has spilled over to some extent into the political realm, where the Parti Québécois now characterizes Quebec as “une nation” and “un peuple” comprised in part of diverse communities of origin, including “les nations autochtones”: in short, what appears to be at least an opening towards a “nations within a nation,” or plurinational, concept of Quebec.9 The failure to ratify the Meech Lake Accord in 1990 coincided with a sharp rise in popular support for sovereignty in Quebec. Certainly there were events and incidents that fueled nationalist tensions during this period. Quebec’s use of the Constitution’s notwithstanding clause to preserve a law limiting the use of English on commercial signage in the province, despite the Supreme Court’s ruling that it constituted a breach of individual freedom of expression rights, provoked a backlash in some segments of English-speaking Canada.10 While these spikes of popular emotion were not irrelevant to the fate of Meech, many commentators viewed the demise of the accord as the logical outcome of the clash of “powerful subterranean forces in Canadian politics: English Canadian populism and Quebec nationalism” representing “fundamentally incompatible world views” (McRoberts 1995a, 25). From a somewhat different perspective, Whitaker (2005, 197) argues that the “populist constitutionalism” that arose in Canada outside Quebec during the constitutional reform process lacked any effective instruments for its
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expression, and so took an exclusively negative form: stopping Meech Lake and threatening gridlock against any new attempt to change the constitution to meet Quebec’s demands. The public commissions and popular consultations launched by the Canadian, Quebec, and other provincial governments in the wake of Meech Lake’s demise, the complex Charlottetown Accord that was cobbled together after intense negotiations, its rejection by both Quebecers and Canadians in simultaneous referenda on the accord – by Quebec voters because of the lack of any significant concessions to asymmetrical federalism in the accord and by voters outside Quebec despite this (Whitaker 1993, 107–14) – and the dramatic changes in partisan politics and voter preferences registered by the federal election of 1993 together suggest a number of things about the state of contending nationalisms and nationalities in Canada at that time. Quebecers, Aboriginals, and other Canadians had different understandings of their nation and national identity and the citizen-state relationships that should follow from this. Moreover, the common ground and willingness to compromise sought and found by political elites in two separate sets of negotiations was not equally evident in the mass publics these elites sought to represent at the constitutional bargaining table. This was evident from the steep decline over time in public support in Englishspeaking Canada for the Meech Lake Accord and in voter rejection of the Charlottetown Accord in Quebec and Canada, including – surprisingly for many because of the accord’s major concessions to the constitutional vision of Aboriginal leaders – by voters on native reserves (McRoberts and Monahan 1993). Changes in the political party system and the 1993 federal election result represent perhaps the most dramatic indicators of a polarizing and fragmenting polity. The Western-based, conservative, and populist Reform Party opposed both the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords on the grounds that all provinces should be equal in terms of their powers and constitutional status and that all Canadians should be accorded exactly the same rights. This led the party to oppose on principle any change that recognized special or differential status for Quebec or Aboriginal peoples. In Quebec, the nationalist Bloc Québécois was created in Parliament after revisions were made to the original Meech Lake pact in an attempt to save it from defeat. The Bloc subsequently committed itself to the defence of Quebec’s interests in Ottawa while pursuing the achievement of sovereignty
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for the province, accepting nothing less than negotiation of a new confederal arrangement between sovereign entities, wherein Quebec and Canada would be equal partners, a position that led it to join the Parti Québécois in opposing the Charlottetown Accord (Bickerton, Gagnon, and Smith 1999). The popularity of the Reform Party and the Bloc rose rapidly between 1990 and 1993, shattering the voter base of the governing Progressive Conservatives by siphoning off its supporters in the West and in Quebec. The 1993 election result made Reform and the Bloc the majority parties in their respective home regions, with the Bloc becoming the official opposition in Ottawa. The 1997 and 2000 elections confirmed this regional splintering of the party system, with the Reform-cum-Canadian Alliance replacing the Bloc in the role of official opposition. Whereas the Mulroney Conservatives had attempted to broker a marriage of Western conservatives and Quebec nationalists, the political polarization around constitutional issues literally pulled the party apart, creating a highly regionalized and ideologically charged Parliament and political landscape. The centrist, brokerage politics of the old-line parties (Liberals, Conservatives, and the NDP) had operated in cartel fashion on the national unity question to remove it as a major issue of partisan debate (all three parties supported both the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords). This approach could not be sustained in the face of a polity increasingly divided in their conception of their nation and what should be the appropriate relationship between Canada’s constituent peoples and communities (Bickerton and Gagnon 2004, 239–62). There were, of course, other factors at work affecting the character and orientation of Canadian and Quebec nationalism at this time. The conscious step towards greater continental integration represented by the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement (FTA) triggered both the 1988 federal election and the great free trade debate that fuelled it. Though ostensibly “resolved” by the outcome of the election, the debate was kept aloft by the negative impact of a sharp recession in the early 1990s, by the inclusion of Mexico in 1993 in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and by the federal election that followed the new agreement; it continued thereafter, with decreasing intensity and relevance as the decade wore on, and it was restricted to a shrinking circle of interlocutors.
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This change in Canada’s economic relationship with the United States had a strong ripple effect on Canadian and Quebec nationalism. Free trade was endorsed by many nationalists in Quebec for a variety of reasons. As in the rest of Canada, business elites were no longer wedded to a protected Canadian market as they once were, while Quebec dairy farmers were sheltered by key exemptions for Canada’s supply management policies. For sovereigntists, the free trade pact’s creation of a North American economic space promised to seriously weaken the arguments of federalists warning of the severe economic costs of Quebec independence. As with the impact of the European Union on minority nations, a secure continental free trade area removed a major impediment to the fuller realization of minority national identities, greater sub-state autonomy, or even full political sovereignty.11 The impact on Canadian nationalism was more contradictory and complex, owing in no small part to English-speaking Canada’s historic wariness of the imperialist tendencies and assimilative powers of their American neighbour and the important element of English Canadian identity that was shaped and stoked by a minoritarian sensibility towards the United States; Canadian national identity has always been in part a declamation of difference from the American “other.” In this context, the free trade agreements provoked a strong negative reaction from many English-speaking Canadians. Thus, outside Quebec every province but Alberta voted in the majority for opposition parties (and thus against the FTA) in the 1988 federal election, with both the Liberals and the NDP appealing to nationalist fears for the long-term survival of the remaining differences that distinguished Canada from the United States (particularly Canada’s social programs and cultural industries). Free trade proponents addressed these concerns by arguing that the stronger Canadian economy they claimed would result from the FTA would give Canadian governments the financial means to bolster and protect national sovereignty, including social programs and culture (Johnston et al. 1992). Much the same sort of debate took place with much less telling effects in 1993, with the added fear that Canadian manufacturing jobs would migrate en masse to low-wage Mexico. With the Liberal Party’s embrace of NAFTA after winning power in 1993, the strong performance of the Canadian economy thereafter, the evident vibrancy of English Canada’s cultural sector, and continued divergence between Canada and the United States in levels of social
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spending, the intellectual force and political support for Canadian economic nationalism dissipated. While some commentators continued to argue and speculate that national coherence and social solidarity would be fatally weakened by Canada’s deeper economic integration into North America, there was little evidence forthcoming that this was, in fact, occurring (Hoberg 2000, S35–S50). Perhaps a more severe strain on Canadians’ sense of national identity than continental free trade was the effect of the fiscal crisis and the government cuts to social spending that followed. With the restructuring of federal fiscal arrangements through the introduction of the Canada Health and Social Transfer in 1995, federal cash transfers to provinces to fund social programs were cut by 37 percent over two years (Simeon and Robinson 2004, 119). The recriminations and resentments caused by this unilateral action by the federal government and the consequent flow-through reduction in funding for health and social services embittered the environment for federal-provincial relations, encouraged the provinces to seek greater autonomy in areas of provincial jurisdiction, and contributed to voter cynicism, distrust, and alienation from politicians, parties, and governments. Amidst a pervasive sense of a weakening social fabric, public concern about the integrity of the health care system, in particular, dominated the political agenda. Only with the annual budget announcements of new “investments” in social programs that accompanied the onset of substantial federal budgetary surpluses beginning in the late 1990s did this strained sense of social citizenship begin to recede, though controversy continued over a federal fiscal imbalance that the provinces argued deprived them of an adequate level of resources to meet the demands of funding and maintaining social infrastructure and services. The referendum defeat of the Charlottetown Accord in 1992 dramatically deflated further discussion on constitutional matters. Preoccupation with the question of fiscal deficits and debt, combined with a pervasive sense of “constitutional fatigue” after years of apparently fruitless debate, negotiation, and wrangling spawned a political vacuum outside Quebec in which the constitution and the national question more generally were rarely if ever mentioned as part of the political agenda. This silence was shattered by events in Quebec: the re-election of the Parti Québécois led by hard-line indépendantiste Jacques Parizeau, the 1995 launching of a second Quebec referendum on independence, and the upsurge in popular
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support for the “Yes” forces that followed charismatic Bloc Québécois leader Lucien Bouchard’s dramatic entry into the referendum campaign (Gagnon 1999). The near defeat for federalist forces in the referendum (slightly over fifty thousand votes separating the two sides) left Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and his federal Liberal government badly shaken. Still profoundly wary of launching any new round of constitutional bargaining, the primary governmental response took the form of federal legislation recognizing Quebec as a distinct society “within the operations of the federal government” and “lending” Parliament’s veto to Quebec, “thereby ensuring Parliament could not pursue constitutional amendments without the prior consent of the Quebec National Assembly” (Gibbins 2004, 138). This left the formal text of the constitution unchanged, and according to federalism scholars such as Roger Gibbins (2004, 138) and Donald Savoie (1999), it did little more than recognize an established fact of Canadian political life: “that Quebec’s concerns were to be treated with special sensitivity within the federal government.” Not surprisingly, then, this federal overture had little discernible effect on the political situation in Quebec. For their part, the other provinces in their Calgary Declaration (and subsequent acts in provincial legislatures) recognized Quebec as a distinct society but within a framework of individual and provincial equality, a much more limited recognition than that provided by either the Meech or Charlottetown Accords (Gibbins 2004). The Quebec referendum result and the federal and provincial legislative initiatives that followed say much about the “dynamic status quo” that characterizes the relationship between Canadian and Quebec nationalism in the wake of the failure of proposals for constitutional reform. A clear majority of French-speaking Quebecers still sought a new relationship between their province and Canada, between the Quebec nation and the Canadian nation. At the same time, a clear majority of Canadians outside Quebec continued to think Quebec should be treated as a province like any other without any additional or special powers (Keating 2001a, 101). Political elites in English-speaking Canada, wary of bumping up against the perceived limits of Canadian nationalism, had become risk-averse when it came to constitutional reform. They were willing to take steps to further accommodate Quebec’s aspirations, but only through limited forms of non-constitutional change and renewal of the Canadian federation.12
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These two aspects of the majority political response to Quebec nationalism are evident in two contrasting initiatives at the end of the 1990s. In 1999 the federal and provincial governments signed a new framework agreement on the social union. The Social Union Framework Agreement (SUFA) committed the governments to a number of principles of collaborative federalism, including an obligation to jointly plan social policy (in the constitution, areas of exclusive provincial jurisdiction) and to consult with each other before introducing new social programs. Thus, although a role for the federal spending power in social programs was affirmed by the agreement, the federal government promised not to introduce any new program without the consent of a majority of the provinces. However, because SUFA did not explicitly provide for provinces to opt out of new shared programs and still receive federal funding, Quebec was not a signatory to the agreement (Gagnon and Segal 2000). The second initiative in 1999 was a unilateral federal one: the Clarity Act. This contrasts with the conciliatory character of previous initiatives by setting out a set of conditions and criteria that would have to be met before Quebec could “negotiate” its way out of the federation. The Act gave Parliament the right to determine whether any future referendum question in Quebec met the Supreme Court’s reference case requirements for a “clear majority” on a “clear question.” The former was left undefined in the Act, while the latter was referred to as a clear expression of the will of the population of Quebec to cease to be part of Canada and to become an independent state. No future negotiations with Quebec over independence or some new form of association would proceed until both these conditions had been met. For its part, Quebec responded with Bill 99, which rejected the application of either the Supreme Court reference case or the Clarity Act to Quebec, deeming both an unacceptable limitation on the democratic will of the people of Quebec (Gibbins 2004, 139–40). Aboriginal nationalism, stateless and highly fragmented geographically, organizationally, and politically, progressed in a number of directions simultaneously after the failure of the Charlottetown Accord. The accord did recognize First Nations’ governments as a third order of constitutionally based government and had it been accepted, “a three-tier asymmetrical form of Canadian federalism would have been established, with a varying emphasis on territory, culture, and biological descent as criteria for constituent governments” (Long and
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Chist 1994, 226). However, while the accord did incorporate the concept of the inherent right of Aboriginal peoples to self-government, the use of the qualifying phrase “within Canada” effectively precluded recognition of any claim to full-blown sovereignty by First Nations governments. Moreover, a number of important questions on both a pragmatic and a philosophical level were left unanswered. How can the multiplicity and diversity of Aboriginal peoples be reflected and captured in any new third order of government? What arrangements can be made to handle cases where territoriality and ethnicity do not coincide? How is the jurisdictional space of Aboriginal governments to be carved out of existing arrangements? How are these new Aboriginal governments to finance themselves (Long and Chist 1994, 229)? The failure of the accord, including its rejection by voters on reserves, both weakened the position of national Aboriginal leaders to negotiate on behalf of all First Nations people and suspended the pursuit of self-government through formal constitutional means. Instead, legislative and administrative initiatives were launched, with federal and provincial governments engaging in negotiations with bands, individual First Nations, and provincial federations, discussing ongoing land claims and the incremental devolution of jurisdiction, authority, and fiscal management through discrete selfgovernment arrangements.13 Progress in the north was most dramatic, with the creation of Nunavut out of the Inuit-inhabited eastern regions of the Northwest Territories, laying the basis for a comprehensive land-claim and resource management agreement and an Inuit territorial government. Another major breakthrough after a long gestation period occurred with the signing of a comprehensive land claim and self-government agreement with the Nisga’a nation of northern British Columbia. In contrast to these examples, general progress on self-government and land claims agreements proceeded in a halting and incremental fashion: occasional confrontations between Aboriginal militants and Canadian governments punctuated the process, and the interminable negotiations were often overshadowed by the social and health problems of many First Nations communities. The 1996 Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples urged sweeping changes based on a nation-to-nation model of relations between indigenous peoples and the Rest of Canada (Cairns 2000, chapter 4). For the most part, this multinational vision of Canada and the major
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recommendations put forth by the Commission were (and continue to be) ignored in favour of bilateral and trilateral negotiations involving Canadian governments (federal and provincial) and individual First Nation communities, with the objective being a gradual and incremental ceding of various authorities and administrative responsibilities to the First Nation governments elected to represent these communities. Over the last two decades of the twentieth century, Canada faced a number of challenges, stresses, and crises. Against a background of destabilizing economic change driven by neo-liberal globalization, fiscal crisis, and cutbacks to intergovernmental transfers and social programs, and intense constitutional negotiations and referenda, Canada’s various nationalisms became locked in a conflict of vision and principles. Repeatedly, individuals were asked to choose between these competing visions, identity communities, and foundational allegiances. With the answers to fundamental questions about the boundaries of political communities, citizen-state and inter-communal relations, legal rights and obligations apparently on the line in an environment of “turning-point” choices and highstakes elite bargaining, the multiple layers and nuances of Canada’s plurinational identities became stressed and polarized: “pried apart” into more exclusive identities. Though severely tested, the Canadian political community did weather these stresses, maintain its political and social cohesion, and resist further political fracturing. A strong sense of Canadian identity and popular attachment to the idea of an overarching and inclusive Canadian nation was an important factor maintaining the unity and sense of community of the Canadian majority during this period. McRoberts (1995a, 16) notes that Canada outside Quebec experienced a high and growing degree of cohesion between 1982 and 1995, which he attributes in large part to their strong support for and identification with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This suggests the key role of a reconstructed and reinforced Canadian nationality in the preservation and continuity of the Canadian state during times of stress and crisis. What this period in Canadian history also demonstrated was the apparent limits of Canadian nationalism regarding the recognition of minority nations. What continues to remain in question is the attachment of Canada’s minority nations to the inclusive Canadian nationality that so clearly binds and mobilizes the majority.
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Whither Canadian Nationalism? There are a number of arguments why majority nationalism in Canada should or must change in the future. One line of thinking is that Canada took a wrong turn in the 1960s when the federal government rejected the b &b Commission’s proposal for a new federalism based on equal partnership between two distinct societies. McRoberts, for instance, argues that it was the success of Pierre Trudeau’s political strategy of selling his own national vision to English-speaking Canadians – a national vision that became a new federal orthodoxy – and then imposing this vision on Quebec, that explains Canada’s subsequent constitutional crises and deadlock and Quebec’s continued dissatisfaction and unhappiness with the federal status quo. This new orthodoxy, claims McRoberts (1993, 259; 1997, 257), replaced a more flexible and open English Canadian orientation to the idea of a binational and bicultural Canada, which would have been more congruent with Quebec’s understanding of the country and its place within it. This damage was never repaired, and until it is, through the majority nation’s recognition of Quebec as a national community of equal status and its willing adoption of constitutional and political asymmetry to reflect this fact, Canada will never be seen as legitimate or be fully embraced by Québécois, and the threat of Quebec secession will be an ever-present reality (McRoberts 1997, 261–5). A basic premise underlying this line of argument is that the notion of a single Canadian nation at the centre of Trudeau’s vision was (and is) simply a political creation, shallow and artificial and amenable to change or even reversible. In effect, the Canadian nation is not authentic in the way that the Quebec nation is, because the latter was borne of social forces that were historically inexorable and inevitable (McRoberts 1997, 259). A corollary of this perspective is English Canada’s aversion to recognizing itself for what it really is: a separate national community within Canada. This lack of selfrecognition and self-consciousness blocks the way to some sort of constitutional settlement in Canada between two authentic and distinct national communities.14 Another claim is that Canada and Quebec must disengage, because over the years they have constructed fundamentally divergent citizenship regimes based on a different understanding of the rights and belonging dimensions of citizenship. As a result, Canadians and
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Quebecers no longer share a common political identity. Each national community has “set out basic social and political choices in quite different ways, giving rise to divergent political identities.” Any new partnership that aims to resolve the national question would have to first clarify these divergent citizenship regimes and then find ways to reconcile them (Jenson 1998, 217–19). Failure to do so could bring about the demise of Canada, since “a democratic polity cannot be sustained without a shared political identity … as divergence on the three dimensions of citizenship [representation, rights, belonging] has grown, the impasse … has become most dramatic” (Jenson 1998, 227). This analysis leads Jane Jenson to conclude that it is only a partnership based on asymmetry “that can produce a win-win outcome within each citizenship regime” and that achieving this solution depends primarily on the actions of non-Quebecers: “only the majority can recognize the minority … responsibility for inclusion of minorities … belongs to the majority” (229–31). Only asymmetry makes possible the pursuit of a variety of collective projects within a single country; only asymmetry makes possible both the protection and the enhancement of individual rights and Quebec’s distinct projet de société simultaneously (232). Finally, not only does Canadian nationalism and English-speaking Canada’s aversion to recognizing itself as a “nation unto itself” frustrate progress on a mutually acceptable revision of the constitutional framework, it also is said to constitute a threat to both Québeçois and indigenous minority nations because it affirms the concept of a single Canadian nationhood. According to Will Kymlicka (1998, 33), “Pan-Canadian nationalism has decreased the political power of national minorities, and jeopardized their existence as culturallydistinct societies.” Once again, the solution posed is the adoption of some form of asymmetrical federalism that would recognize Canada as a federation of peoples, affirm the equal status of each of these peoples, and thereby affirm the differential citizenship status of Quebec and Aboriginal nations within Canada (ibid). There are, of course, obstacles preventing and difficulties with this proposed restructuring of majority-minority relations in Canada. This is particularly so regarding the transformation of an inclusive Canadian nationalism into a more limited Rest-of-Canada nationalism – deemed possible one supposes because of the presumed artificiality or lack of authenticity of an inclusive Canadian nation – as the prelude or corollary to constructing a new multinational
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federation. Alternatives to this, such as jettisoning key elements of Canadian nationalism or simply setting it aside as no longer functional or necessary (a post-nationalism scenario) are also problematic. Finally, concerns can be raised about the identity effects and long-term viability in a decentralized federation such as Canada of reforms giving further autonomy to minority nations without balancing this with expanded or strengthened institutions or processes of representation and participation within an inclusive Canadian nation. With regard to questions about the historical foundations and authenticity of modern Canadian nationalism, McRoberts’ (1997, 188; 1995a, 9–10) own analysis of its development notes that the idea of binationalism and biculturalism never enjoyed much support in English Canada and that in any event the ethnic basis for an English Canadian identity began to dissipate after the First World War and, certainly by the 1960s and 1970s, was no longer of any relevance; in short, there is no “English Canada” to act as a counterpoint and interlocutor for Quebec. With regard to Trudeau’s centrality as the creator or initiator of Canada’s new sense of national identity, its various elements were well-established before Trudeau came on the scene. As noted by Jenson (1998, 224), these had been evident since the 1920s and had clearly been a central part of the federal government’s own projet de société from the Second World War onward: a nation-creating project developed in reaction to threats to Canadian identity and independence from both British and American hegemony and in reaction to the regionalism/sectionalism that had been a primary obstacle in the interwar period to the emergence of an integrated Canadian nation capable of concerted action on shared concerns. Trudeau’s national vision was a consolidation of the various existing elements of Canadian nationality, one presented to Canadians at a time when they were sorely in need of a new national vision and carried forward successfully because of the powerful social forces that mobilized behind it, especially those of various identity groups (McRoberts 1998, 250–1). “English Canada,” “Canada outside Quebec,” or the “Rest of Canada” (Canada other than French-speaking Quebecers) has no sense of itself as a nation apart: on this point almost all observers seem to agree. Canadians long ago let go of the dream of a singular national identity and instead embraced diversity and equality as a route to national unity. This may help to account for the laudatory absence of xenophobia, exclusionary tendencies, or fear about ethnic
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purity or the integrity of their language and culture, and so on. All of these, as Kymlicka notes, are deeply admirable qualities and the basis for an open, tolerant, and inclusive society. But would this form of inclusive nationality and citizenship, which has succeeded so well in anchoring a stable and prosperous state and an open and tolerant society, be undermined by more extensive political and institutional autonomy for minority nations? The multinational solution of simply excising Quebec and Quebecers from an inclusive Canadian nationality, thereby creating a residual Rest-of-Canada nation, might accomplish little more than displacing the current problems of reconciling unity with diversity onto the disentangled English Canadian nationality (Kernerman 2005, 9). Moreover, it has been argued that the whole disentanglement strategy associated with asymmetrical or deep diversity solutions – whereby Canadians would abandon the dream of one inclusive Canadian nation – might endanger future political stability, since it is this very entanglement that maintains the Canadian conversation that binds all Canadians together. Finally, concerns have been expressed about the character of any “authentic English Canadian nationalism” that is induced through some form of disentanglement strategy. “Mechanisms of English Canadian moderation could be put aside in the vigorous pursuit of English Canadian authenticity … The great danger of the proposal for English Canadian nationalism is that once English Canada does ‘speak its name’ [a reference to Philip Resnick’s characterization of English Canada as ‘a nation that dares not speak its name’],” it ceases to exist in the form we have known it: that is, implicit within an open and tolerant Canadian nationalism.15 If Canadian nationalism itself is more deeply rooted and authentic than some have suggested and not transferable or transformable into a ‘Rest-of-Canada’ or English Canadian nationalism, are any of its key constitutive elements amenable to change such that it would be more compatible with minority nation claims and aspirations? This is possible but currently seems unlikely. The drive to embed the principle of provincial equality (a major impediment to the adoption of constitutional asymmetry) was spurred by the hardened stance adopted in the 1970s by the provinces on this question, especially the Western provinces, experiencing a renewed westward shift of wealth and population; this shift of population and wealth has only proceeded apace since that time (McRoberts 1997, 186–7). As for
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the place of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in Canadian national identity, it has become central, exerting a “transformative impact” on all three dimensions of Canada’s citizenship regime (Jenson 1998, 220). Further, it could be argued that Canadians’ desire for a strong national government and national identity is ongoing, perpetually linked to minoritarian fears of a loss of national identity and capability. These fears will continue because of the inevitable and ever-closer embrace of the United States, the perceived threat (for some) of creeping decentralization and provincialism, and sensitivity to the potentially corrosive effects of both of the foregoing, and neo-liberal globalization more generally, on the social components of Canadian citizenship. Thus, radical decentralization has been resisted as a constitutional solution to Canada’s national question (and rightly so in Jenson’s opinion) because “it risked frittering away Canada [and the national identity of Canadians] without solving the problem of Quebec” (1998, 220). What of the claim that Canadian nationalism must be “rolled back” or that it must shed its inclusive character because it negates or disables Canada’s minority nations? In fact, political and cultural space has been created within the Canadian nationality for contestation over national identities and the distribution of resources required for the development of minority nationalities. At the same time, the inclusive national identity requires institutions and values to give it expression, with avenues for the recognition and representation of all individuals as Canadians. It is worth bearing in mind that it has been within this historical and sociological context that the dual identities of individuals in minority national communities has developed, with the minority identity sometimes nested within, sometimes counterpoised against, the overarching national identity. Nor has the pursuit of a variety of collective projects within a single country, the achieved reality in Canada, required the adoption of significant constitutional asymmetry. Quebec has vigorously pursued its projet de société giving institutional expression to its distinct character within Canada without excising or negating the Canadian dimension of their citizens’ identity and nationality. As a result, two successful nationalities and two distinct citizenship regimes have been created; Quebecers belong to both and continue to exhibit the capacity to be “two things at once.” They share in Canadian political identity and have been active participants in the Canadian national project as well as Quebec’s; indeed, it is fair to say they have
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constructed both nationalities. This does mean that Quebecers (and Aboriginals) have a different sense of citizenship and nationality than non-Québécois (and non-Aboriginals) and that such asymmetries of identity cannot be transformed into symmetries, neither by politics nor argument.16 But this coexistence and overlapping of national identities has not been debilitating for either the majority or minority nation; quite the contrary, as Canada and Quebec’s respective and combined political, social, and economic success clearly illustrates. The relationship between national identities and institutions is a final important consideration. In the extensive work done on Canadian federalism, a central finding has been that constitutions and institutions have an independent “shaping power” that can transform the values of a society and affect its future course. This insight helps explain intergovernmental conflict in Canada, in particular that behind the conflict there is an ongoing struggle for the power to shape a society (Cook 2005, 167). For supporters of federalism, this suggests the need to recognize, maintain, and reinforce the inclusive national dimension of Canadians’ civic existence, as well as the regional or minority nation dimension of their political identity, including the constitutional framework and institutional supports for dual identities and political personalities within the Canadian federation (Cairns 2000). Given these insights, the deep skepticism of the majority about constitutional reform proposals that include major elements of asymmetry is not an entirely inappropriate response. Would a radically asymmetrical solution to the challenge of managing internal diversity by facilitating the political disengagement of minority national communities (legally, institutionally, and psychologically) further erode feelings of shared political identity and social solidarity (in effect the bonds of a shared, rights-based citizenship)? If so, such an arrangement would be inherently unstable, especially because in Quebec “the dynamics of political competition would continue to be driven by nationalism” (Cairns, as quoted in Cook 2005, 174). It is from this perspective that Alan Cairns (1999, 6, 20) argues that multicultural diversity is far more easily accommodated than multinational diversity, since greater autonomy for nations with a territorial base invariably leads to demands for more disengagement and possible secession. “Multinational diversity challenges the integrity of the state as well as the definition of a people … it will be
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difficult to prevent deep diversity recognition from slipping into a politics of exclusion.” Identities are not naturally single or exclusive but multiple and complex in both individuals and communities. In the case of Canada, “rest-of-Canadian, Québécois, and Aboriginal realities do not appear as co-existing insularities, but as composite categories, as in the Canadian.” The human capacity to sustain and compartmentalize multiple identities is “a highly developed skill of contemporary citizens” (Cairns, as quoted in Cook 2005, 177). Moreover, cultural convergence and the increasing commonality of values surely expands the basis for people with distinct identities to share institutions; it should increase the potential for “living together and living apart at the same time” (Cook 2005, 177). This speaks directly to the situation of Canada’s Indigenous peoples, in particular the “nation-to-nation” political relations advocated by the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, which is deeply ambivalent toward Canadian citizenship and “focuses on the maximum attainable escape from the majority society … to insulate Aboriginal nations to the maximum extent possible from the democratic politics of the larger society” (Cairns 2000, 363). While some Aboriginal scholars and leaders continue to assert the principles of nation-to-nation relations between equals and “mutual national coexistence” as the appropriate basis for relations between Aboriginal nations and the Canadian state, even to the point of rejecting their status as Canadian citizens (Ladner 2003, 55–7), the reality for Indigenous peoples in Canada is at variance with this. Small size, financial dependence, and powerful forces of integration constrain both the possibility and the aspiration to sovereignty that propels nationalist rhetoric. Simply put, there is an unbridgeable gap between the ambitions of Aboriginal nationalism and what is attainable for the vast majority of First Nations. The demographic reality of division into 627 micro-nations, only 35 of which have populations of more than 2,000 and nearly two-thirds of which have onreserve populations of less than 500, sharply circumscribes First Nation governing capacities. In this context, the enormous and arduous task of nation-preservation – of building and sustaining, in Kymlicka’s terms, a “separate societal culture” – is a highly doubtful enterprise for the vast majority of First Nations, given the constraints flowing from small size (Cairns 2000, 357–8). There can be no denying the powerful attraction and mobilizing capacity of anti-colonial Indigenous nationalism in settler societies
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such as Canada. It is a nationalism “rooted in the experience of being colonized and thus deprived of self-rule, [generating] a solidarity in its adherents and social distance from the majority society. In the present period, this discourages interest in shared rule” (Cairns 2000, 364–5). Yet this nationalism, like other fourth-world Indigenous nationalisms, lacks the option of independence and implants nationalist aspirations that defy all demographic realities. Moreover, it is confronted by a powerful, country-wide Canadian nationalism that “has its own momentum embedded in institutions that are not easily changed … that supports evolutionary continuity.” It, too, has “an impressive mobilizing capacity through wielding the resources of patriotism and citizenship” (Cairns 2000, 364). Though difficult, there is no other long-term solution to this clash of nationalisms but to work out a viable compromise rooted in the dual identity of Aboriginal and Canadian.
Conclusion Both Canada and Quebec have been subjected to the full extent of the homogenizing and integrating forces of modernization, and each has demonstrated the cohesion, national will, and the enhanced capacities needed to construct autonomous political space for itself in response to these forces. And like all nationalisms, pace Anderson, they have been Janus-faced in their top-down (state-orchestrated) and bottom-up (popular identification) manifestations. They have been Janus-faced as well in that they sometimes have turned a majoritarian face toward their own internal minority nations and a minoritarian face when confronted by the threat and challenge of a larger, often oblivious “other” nation with which they are entangled: in the case of Quebec, of course, its Canadian partner; in the case of English-speaking Canada, the looming presence of its much larger American neighbour. The development of the Canadian nationality also has been portrayed as a process of maneuvering (sometimes staggering) between “a rock and a hard place.” For besides the need and compulsion to stake out and preserve a distinctive Canadian nationality in the shadow of – and occasionally in defiance of – its assertive and imperial neighbour, it also has been pressured by other forces: the rock of Quebec’s demands for duality in the form of an equal partnership between the federation`s two founding nations and the hard place of
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provincial demands for more autonomy and for constitutional equality with Quebec (Gibbins 1998, 401). Clearly, the rocks and hard places of continentalism, provincialism, and Quebec nationalism have been central influences in the Janus-faced development of Canadian nationalism. In the process, space has been created within an overarching and inclusive Canadian identity for nested Quebec and Aboriginal nationalities. Both Canada and Quebec have acquired substantial capacities for the pursuit of societal projects and the expression of national values and identities. In contrast, Aboriginal peoples are still in the process of acquiring the basic capacities for giving expression to their distinctive nationalities within the larger Canadian and/or Quebec context; ahead is the long-term and daunting task of minority-nation preservation and minority-nation building, the scope of which constitutes an enormous challenge for even the most populous and well-endowed (in human, cultural, organizational, and resource terms) of Canada’s Indigenous peoples. The mutual accommodation of minority and majority nationalities (1) requires that the minority national collectivity be recognized and facilitated and that the rights, powers, and capacities associated with minority nation status be a matter for ongoing negotiation and adjustment; (2) at the same time, this process of recognition and accommodation pertains as well to the status of members of the minority nation as full and equal citizens within the overarching inclusive nationality; and (3) it requires that accommodation and recognition is a mutual and reciprocal process between majority and minorities in a plurinational democracy. What are the practical implications of this? When do the nationalities chafe against the other and create points of rivalry and conflict, instead of the co-existence and complementarity associated with the concept of a “nested” national identity? And where there is a competitive or exclusivist dimension in governance arrangements or relations, how best can this be managed without suppressing or negating one of the national identities? A great deal of the potential conflict of this sort between Canada’s inclusivist nationality and Quebec’s minority nationality has been averted through the mechanisms and institutions of Canada’s highly decentralized federal system, as well as certain other provisions within the constitution (such as official bilingualism). When and where this has proven insufficient, non-constitutional asymmetries in federal practices have developed through organic processes that thrive in the lee of “constitutional
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vagaries, silences, abeyances, and ambiguities” (Simeon and Conway 2001, 346–7). These are particularly evident in the areas of social programs, immigration, and other matters.17 If Canadian federalism is to continue to be successful, however, there must be a “building in” as well as a building-out process. That is, care must be taken to establish “integrative counterweights” to provincial and minority-nation identities and governments that will reinforce Canadian identities and values. Such counterweights confer institutional support for inclusive and nested identities and dual loyalties in the federation. This provides the necessary balance for majority concessions to the minority and the institutionalization of difference. In short, institutional design should both help reconcile minorities to federalism and bind minority and majority together (Simeon and Conway 2001, 361–3). Senate and electoral system reform are probably the two most obvious changes in institutional design that would provide greater institutional counterweights to provincialism and minority nationalism, the first by improving the representative capacity of Parliament and the second the national party system (Tanguay 2004, 263–86; Bickerton 2006). This balancing act of recognition, representation, and accommodation within Canada’s plurinational setting is a continual process of adjustment, replete with fiscal, programmatic, institutional, ideological, and symbolic dimensions. Occasionally it also may require national leaders – Canadian, Quebecois, and Aboriginal – to send mixed messages, to talk one way and act another, a political skill that never seems to be in short supply.18 Canada is not unique as a liberal democratic country struggling with the problem of managing internal diversity and accommodating more than one nationality and nationalism. In particular, the situation in Canada has its parallels in plurinational Britain and Spain. Yet it is in Canada where a minority nation has proceeded furthest with nation-building and enjoys the greatest autonomy and scope of sub-state powers. It is only appropriate, then, that arguments and constitutional proposals to take this even further through more extensive constitutional and institutional asymmetry be subjected to close scrutiny. In particular, are the risks involved in a new round of constitutional initiatives worth taking, given its inevitably re-polarizing effects on identities and loyalties? Is this the best path for pursuing a resolution of Canada’s nationalities question? Or should Canadians, including Québécois and Aboriginal Canadians,
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err on the side of caution and modesty with regard to further constitutional tinkering? Should they rely instead on the flexibility and adaptive capacity of their federation as presently constituted in order to adjust accommodative practices to fit Canada’s evolving plurinational character? In Robert Young’s evocative phrasing, the Canadian federation has been “stretched” to accommodate the presence of both Quebec and, more recently, Aboriginal nations. Constitutional silences and abeyances, ambiguities, pragmatic adaptation, and non-constitutional agreements have proven to be useful devices for bridging the gap between the principled and apparently irreconcilable oppositions provoked by the clash of nationalities (Thomas 1997; Simeon and Conway 2001; Gibbins 2004). Canada may not ever be converted to a truly multinational state, but increasingly – through various practices, institutional adaptations, and legal and political aspects – it appears to operate on both a functional and a symbolic level as a plurinational one, ultimately making possible, to use James Tully’s term, the “citizenization” of all of Canada’s peoples (Russell 2005, 238).
notes 1 Politically and legally this may not have been so, but culturally, functionally, and affectively, French-speaking Canadians were marginalized, misrecognized, and excluded. 2 The Commission report presented “a detailed plan for institutional restructuring within federalism to balance the goals of unity and diversity, national development, and regional fairness. Federal responsibility for high levels of employment, national standards, and regional equalization would be combined with provincial discretion in social programs” (551). 3 The “opening up” in the 1960s of Canada’s restrictive immigration policy in short order made Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean (and particularly the first of these) Canada’s main sources of new immigrants, a long-term shift that would transform the ethnic and racial composition of Canada’s large urban centres in subsequent decades (Cairns 1999). 4 The Canada Health Act (1984), which purports to defend the basic principles of medicare in Canada, was passed with the unanimous approval of all parties in Parliament, and the act continues to be regarded by all
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6
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8
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federalist parties, at least officially, as a kind of sacred trust that they are duty-bound to defend and uphold. This was particularly so during the infamous kidnappings and bombings of the FLQ in the 1960s, culminating in the 1970 October Crisis. Official concern about national security continued throughout the 1970s, as evidenced by the revelations of the MacDonald Commission about RCMP wrongdoing while the force was conducting undercover operations against nationalist organizations in Quebec (Whitaker 2004, 223–36). Most notable amongst these perhaps was the Quebec Pension Plan, finally agreed to by the federal government after prolonged negotiations and a tense political standoff on the issue (Simeon 1972). This formula (was strongly endorsed by the provinces in 1975 and formally agreed to by the government of Quebec in the so-called Vancouver Consensus among the eight dissenting provinces who were opposing the unilateral constitutional initiative that the Trudeau government had launched in the wake of the failed constitutional conference, which followed the Quebec referendum. It was insisted upon by the nine provinces who were the eventual signatories to the 1982 constitutional agreement. It actually contains several amending formulae, and most changes require the agreement of the federal Parliament along with seven provinces constituting at least 50 percent of the population. This was the recognition of Canada’s Aboriginal peoples (Indian, Inuit, and Métis) and the entrenchment of their treaty and Aboriginal rights in section 35, along with the insulation of these rights (in section 25) from the potentially levelling effects of the Charter. As described in the Parti Québécois’ June 2005 Déclaration de principes pour un programme de pays, “Le Québec est un peuple très majoritairement francophone au sein duquel sont insérées des communautés d’origines diverse, dont la communauté Anglophone, et les nations autochtones.” In the so-called Brockville incident, the Quebec flag was trampled by people protesting the sign law, which not surprisingly generated counteroutrage and heightened feelings of defensive solidarity amongst Quebecers, and so on. For a more complete and nuanced analysis of the dynamics of continentalism and Quebec nationalism, see (Martin 1997). For example, commenting on the government’s decision to allow Quebec to represent itself at UNESCO, Prime Minister Harper said that Quebec’s participation “is not a step toward a new round of constitutional talks nor is it recognition of Quebec as a nation in any form” (Séguin 2006).
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13 The process, when it works, is akin to what Menno Boldt advocated in Surviving as Indians (1993, 138): “an inductive-evolutionary approach beginning with the negotiation of a framework agreement with the federal government based on an ‘expandable mandate’ for Indian governments … a ‘minimalist model’ of self-government … that would allow each Indian community to undertake a process of evolving its own model of selfgovernment with some assurance regarding the future.” 14 Perhaps the most prominent exponent of this view is Philip Resnick (1994, 114): “We need to disaggregate the specifically English Canadian from the Canadian tout court. We need to stop using Quebec or aboriginal peoples as hostages to our refusal to confront our own identity.” See also McRoberts (1997, 267–8). 15 Kernerman (2005, 62). Kernerman bases his approach on James Tully’s analysis of contestation over the place of minority nations in the Canadian constitution as a “conversation” that normalizes disagreement and therefore has a civilizing and “citizenizing” effect on the parties to the conversation. In effect, though the parties may agree on little more than what it is that is worth disagreeing about, this engages and unites them. 16 Notable here is the work of Philip Resnick (1994), whose frustration with English Canada’s failure to confront its own identity has, in his opinion, caused no end of problems for Quebec and Aboriginals. Regarding the desire of Quebec nationalists for symmetry in Quebec-Canada relations, one recalls Lucien Bouchard’s comments during the referendum that a “Yes” victory would be akin to “waving a magic wand” in terms of creating the basis for a confederal partnership of equals. 17 The initiative of the federal Conservative government to permit greater projection of the Quebec nationality into the international arena through representation on UNESCO bodies is the most recent example, hailed by Prime Minister Harper as a “federalism of openness” and “an arrangement that symbolizes our vision of a strong, flexible Canadian federation” of the sort that will “bolster national unity” (Séguin 2006). 18 One example of this “words versus actions” dissonance is Prime Minister Harper’s initial refusal to call Quebec a nation; such a discussion is “semantic debate that doesn’t serve any purpose.”Yet Harper’s government has given the nod to Quebec’s representation on international cultural bodies such as UNESCO and acted to rectify the federal fiscal imbalance to Quebec’s benefit (Curry 2006). Shortly, thereafter Harper did a partial about-face on the nation question by having Parliament pass a resolution stating that the Québécois constituted a nation within a united Canada.
8 The Reality of American Multiculturalism: American Nationalism at Work Liah Greenfeld In the context of the present discussion, the United States presents a paradox: the openness, fluidity, and individualistic nature of American society, which reflects its national consciousness, despite the vociferous “multiculturalism” of the academy, the media, and to a large extent the political establishment, denies ethnic differences cultural significance.
Particularist Loyalties and Nation in the United States Despite the extreme diversity of ethnic origins among Americans, perhaps equalled only by the diversity of origins among Israeli Jews and Australians, ethnic considerations of whatever kind are absolutely foreign to the federalist tradition and institutions of the United States. The nation had been conceived as a federation of selfgoverning communities of individuals, with no account taken of the ethnic composition of these communities, and the federal structure has always remained a mechanism for the protection of the rights of individuals, rather than groups. During the first century of the national history, especially in the original states along the Atlantic coast, it is true, these self-governing communities of individuals developed fierce particularistic loyalties and for all intents and purposes became groups to which the rights of individuals within them were considered subservient. These particularistic loyalties were at first innocuous and not only coexisted peacefully with but reinforced the sense of general (or federal) national commitment. But with the acquisition of new territories and the declaration of California as a
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free state after the end of the Mexican War, they congealed around the contentious issue of slavery, which was, paradoxically, the issue of the interpretation of American liberty, and undermined the national commitment, putting the existence of the nation itself in grave danger. After the Civil War – by far the greatest conflict in the history of the United States to date, and entirely unconcerned with ethnic differences – the states were no longer admissible objects of ardent civic loyalty that could in any way compete with the loyalty to the national whole, and in general dual loyalties were no longer tolerated. Federalism, more than ever before, became an institutional mechanism for the protection of individual rights. It so happened that precisely as the Civil War put an end to state particularism, the salience of ethnic differences in the United States vastly increased. The increase in ethnic diversity itself was not the sole reason for that. Ethnic diversity had characterized the American society from the eighteenth century. It did not go entirely unnoticed. Franklin, for instance, lamented it in “Observations Concerning the … Peopling of Countries,” asking rhetorically (and perhaps part in jest): “Why should the Palatine boors be suffered to swarm into our settlements and, by herding together, establish their language and manners to the exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of us anglifying them, and will never adopt our language or customs any more than they can acquire our complexion?” The problem of complexion provoked in this patriot a further consideration in support of uniformity: “The number of purely white people in the world is proportionally very small,” he argued. All Africa is black or tawny; Asia is chiefly tawny; America (exclusive of newcomers), wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians, and Swedes are generally of what we call a swarthy complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who, with the English, make the principal body of white people on the face of the earth. I could wish their numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, scouring our planet by clearing America of woods, and so making this side of our globe reflect a brighter light to the eyes of inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we, in the sight of superior being,
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darken its people? Why increase the sons of Africa by planting them in America, where we have so fair an opportunity, by excluding all blacks and tawnies, of increasing the lovely white and red? But perhaps I am partial to the complexion of my country, for such kind of partiality is natural to mankind. But neither was it a matter that forced itself on – or even presented itself to – public attention. For Americans of English extraction ethnicity was not an issue, for it never became one in England. Since the beginning of English national history Englishmen accepted any person born in England, no matter of what extraction, as a member of the nation and were quite ready to accept as such all those born elsewhere who wished to be considered English and had the interests of England at heart. Defoe’s celebration of an immigrant of mixed origins as a “true-born Englishman” was only one of many expressions of this voluntaristic attitude. And while Americans who hailed from elsewhere were more aware of the essential Englishness of their new country than were, by and large, English Americans, they saw this Englishness as a national American characteristic and appropriated it as part and parcel, in effect the very core, of their American identity. The first American to broach the question of what it means to be one was J. Hector St John de Crevecoeur, an immigrant from France, who, in his “Letters from an American Farmer,” while attempting to answer it, guessed at the likely thoughts of a visitor from England: “He must greatly rejoice that he lived to see this fair country discovered and settled; he must necessarily feel a share of national pride… [He must say to himself:] ‘This is the work of my countrymen … They brought along with them their national genius, to which they principally owe what liberty they enjoy and what substance they possess.’ Here he sees the industry of his native country displayed in a new manner.” What was new in the post-Civil War period was therefore not so much the greater degree of ethnic heterogeneity of the immigration, its ethnic composition in which Eastern and Southern European elements came to predominate over Western and Northern European ones, or even its colossal size but the fact that in the last half of the nineteenth century the cultural significance of ethnicity (the way it was understood) changed both in the countries from which the immigrants were coming and in the United States.
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Nationalism and the Political Importance of Ethnicity In general, “ethnicity” is nothing more than an umbrella term for ascriptive characteristics, that is, characteristics independent of one’s will and acquired by the accident of birth, from the color of one’s eyes, the hue of one’s skin, the texture of one’s hair – or one’s physical type more generally – to one’s language or manner of speaking it, or even the language of one’s ancestors, one’s religion or the religion of one’s ancestors, one’s or one’s ancestors’ presumed connection to a certain territory, customs, dietary requirements or habits, and the like. Since some easily visible ascriptive characteristics (such as eye or hair color, for instance) differ even in the smallest community, ethnic diversity, as a matter of fact, is a ubiquitous feature of human societies. However, in most of them ethnic differences have had little, if any, significance and no impact on social relations, be they conflictual or consensual, beyond the strictly personal level. In the past, the characteristics acquired by birth that were considered significant were those that were believed to be providential, rather than accidental: i.e., belonging or not belonging to a particular legal estate. A person carried his or her social status, and therefore actual position and role in life, in his or her blood – the fact that a certain person was born into a princely family or into a peasant’s had nothing accidental in it, for every person was “called” by providence, and so was by his very nature, either a prince or a peasant. These significant ascriptive characteristics were cultural, but most cultural characteristics, such as language and, especially, religion, were not ascriptive, even if acquired at birth, because it was believed that language could be learned, while religion, whatever was the religion of one’s ancestors, was fundamentally a matter of personal responsibility. It is true that the social ascendancy and less than orthodox Christian practices of the recently and forcibly converted Jewish population in the Spain of their most Catholic majesties of Castille and Aragon, barely free from the Moslem rule, caused resentment among the older Christian nobility and led to the talk of limpieza de sangre as a criterion of the sincerity of faith. But this was an exception, for in Christian Europe, religion – the sphere of the soul – was least of all a function of blood and could not be transmitted through bodily fluids. It is only our modern and materialistic age that came to see it as such, as it did other cultural attributes, such as
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language. And it was this age that first thought of “ethnicity” as a culturally significant category – the category for cultural characteristics acquired by birth – and that turned ethnic diversity (that is, diversity of ascriptive characteristics) into a social problem and a source of political conflict. Like modernity in general, this changed attitude to ethnicity was a product of nationalism. Nationalism is the cognitive framework, or broad world view, that emerged in early sixteenth-century England and became the cultural foundation of modern society and politics and the modern economy. At its core lies the image of reality whose significant unit is the “nation” – that is, a mass of population, whether a few thousand or several billion strong, that is regarded as sovereign and as a community of equals. It logically follows from the idea of an earthly population (rather than transcendental forces and their divinely appointed representatives) as the bearer of sovereignty that this image is essentially secular: it is focused on this world and represents it as ultimately meaningful. The philosophical materialism underpinning modern attitudes in virtually every sphere of social existence, in turn, logically follows from this endowment of the mundane with ultimate meaning. The concept of the “nation” presented above allows for a number of interpretations of popular sovereignty and equality, depending on whether the nation is defined in composite terms (namely, as an association of individuals) or in unitary terms (as a collective of individuals) and whether membership is believed to be in principle voluntary or innate. In the latter case, nationality itself is perceived as an ascriptive characteristic, acquired by birth, like physical type or sex, and transmitted by the blood, i.e., genetically; in other words, nationality is viewed as ethnicity, and we are faced with ethnic nationalism. Such a perception, on the one hand, obscures the cultural and historical and thus the constructed nature of nations and national membership, while, on the other hand, it dramatically increases the cultural significance of ethnicity and therefore its importance as a social and political force. It is as an element of ethnic nationalism that ethnicity becomes a source of identity and the foundation on which people base their attitudes to and relations with others. Before there was nationalism these attitudes and relations were based on one’s own and others’ cultural attributes, for which one was considered to be personally responsible, either as a result of choices (as in the case of religion and language) or as a result of divine calling, which it was one’s duty to
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heed (as in the case of one’s social position). In the framework of ethnic nationalism, one’s social relations and attitudes became the function of pure – biological – accident. Because ethnic identity (i.e., an identity based on ascriptive, accidental characteristics acquired by birth) elevates purely biological features, such as physical type, to the level of cultural attributes and reduces cultural attributes, such as language and religion, to the level of purely biological features, distinctions between cultural identity groups necessarily turn into essential differences, similar to differences between people with incompatible blood types or even those between different biological species. They establish between such groups relations of insurmountable foreignness. Although the experience of intermarriage and the production of robust progeny of mixed ethnicity (mixed bloods – what an eloquent expression of the cultural significance of biology!) systematically contradicts the assumption of such foreignness, it does little to undermine it, because, as is well known, even most intolerant people are remarkably tolerant of contradictions. With the social situation defined in this manner, consensus easily breaks down along ethnic lines, competition over scarce resources (status, wealth, and political power) is likely to be seen in terms of ethnic rivalry, and as a result the coexistence of several ethnic groups, or ethnic diversity, comes to be perceived as a natural ground for conflict, always ready to erupt and contained only thanks to wise conflict management. The political importance of ethnicity depends not on the measure of ethnic diversity within a community but on the significance assigned by the culture to ethnic differences. In nationalisms that regard membership as in principle voluntary ethnicity plays little role. Israel, whose Jewish population is one of the most ethnically diverse communities in the world, is a case in point. (Its characterization as both Jewish and extremely diverse should surprise no one: after all it surprises no one that almost all of the extreme ethnic diversity in the United States is concentrated within the population that is Christian by religious origin.) Israel is an open society. The fact that nationality in it is (for historical reasons) identified with religion reinforces its openness, for a religion accepting converts throws the gates of the political community open to people of any origin. The Law of Return brought together in one very small society people of every possible complexion, from pale, blue-eyed blonds of Northern Europe to ebony-colored Ethiopians, people of physical types as
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varied as in the United States, languages as numerous and cultural traditions (namely, family customs and rituals, cuisines, ideas on what constitutes the good life, etc.) as diverse, and people of different religious orientations. The majority of the Israeli population is atheist; that is, they are not Jews, if Judaism is defined as a religion. But they are a part of the Jewish community according to the religious law, because they are descendants of a line of Jewish women. Many of them, especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union, are Christians. That is, they are obviously not Jews according to the religious law but they are still a part of the Jewish community, because the secular Law of Return applies to every person with at least one Jewish grandparent of whatever sex. The newcomers may keep apart or be kept apart by the circumstances, but their children intermix when they are in the army, if not before; they intermarry at a very high rate, and in the second generation they form one common ethnicity of native-born Israelis, or Sabras, different from the ethnicities of their immigrant parents. Conflicts in Israeli society, which may be perceived as ethnic because, for instance, parties to them sport different skin color or practice different marriage customs, are in fact conflicts between different waves of immigration, the old-comers defending their hard-earned privileges, the new-comers fighting for theirs, which have nothing to do with the nature of anyone’s ethnicity. Israel is a multiethnic society, which makes no fuss over its “multiculturalism.” It is different in the United States. English nationalism, from which American nationalism developed, defined membership in the nation in strictly voluntary, i.e., civic, terms. But already one of the two nationalisms that developed on the continent in the course of the eighteenth century, the Russian, was an ethnic nationalism. The only ethnic nation that was a source of a sizeable immigration to the United States before the Civil War, however, was Germany, and German immigrants, indeed, had a perceptibly harder time adjusting to their new society than others, for instance, the French; German immigrants were made unassimilable by their national identity; they tended to feel foreign, and many of them, after not very eagerly trying to blend in, decided that they did not like America after all, reasserted their Germanity, and returned home. Many others remained, but remained German in America, keeping all the cultural baggage they believed they carried in their blood and transmitted it to their children – among the pre–Civil War immigrants theirs was a singular case.
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After 1848, however, nationalism spread throughout Europe like wildfire, and most post-1848 nationalisms were ethnic. Therefore, the great majority of people arriving in the United States in the last quarter of the nineteenth century were already members of nations whose cultural identity was believed to be innate (if not by themselves – for in their mass the immigrants were too busy to engage in deep introspection – then by the intellectuals among them). At the same time American intellectuals, usually white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, began travelling in large numbers to Germany for their university studies, making German scholarship, especially in history, philosophy, and what would soon be called the “social sciences,” the absolute model for the respective American disciplines. The ideas that prevailed in the Germany of the day were those of ethnic nationalism elevated to the status of science (whether the history of Treitschke, the Nazionaloekonomie deriving from the views of List, or the social philosophy of Kathedersozialisten). As a result, American academics, incongruously, imagined social reality (namely, politics, economic processes, social relations) in the quasi-biological terms of ethnic nationalism and nationality in terms of ethnicity. The fact that President Wilson, the author of the idea of “national selfdetermination,” was among the first political scientists in the United States demonstrates how profound the implications of the German education of American professors were. The coincidence of these two developments, the mass immigration from ethnic nations and the derivation of American social-science thinking from ethnic nationalism, resulted in American society, on the whole, accepting the residual, ethnic loyalty of its newer citizens to their Old World origins, a loyalty that coexisted with the national loyalty to the United States and made hyphenated, ethnic Americans a permanent feature of the national scene. But this very tolerance in the context of the individualistic and voluntary American nationalism simultaneously trivialized ethnicity to such an extent that it deprived it of all its potential influence on social and political relations. In the United States ethnic diversity is both glorified and deprived of cultural significance.
Freedom, Equality, and Multiculturalism American multiculturalism, paradoxically, is proof of the absolute deculturalization of ethnicity in the United States, its reduction to
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purely biological, accidental, and ascriptive attributes, for which the individual bears no responsibility whatsoever and which, therefore, according to the stringently individualistic American ethic, cannot be judged. The paradigmatic example of American multiculturalism is the set of six basic Crayola crayons for young children called Multicultural Crayons. Culture here is identified with the colour of one’s skin, as the drawing on the box suggests, that is, with a physical, genetically transmitted, and morally indifferent characteristic. Indeed, race as marked by skin color is the only element in the indigenous American experience to which the great majority of Americans can meaningfully apply the term “ethnicity.” As a result, the concept, for which “ethnic culture” or simply “culture” are conventional substitutes, is generally understood as race. But the word “race” is banished from polite discourse as both unscientific (physical characteristics, we have learned, tell us nothing about people’s moral and intellectual qualities, which are the only ones that matter, and therefore, should not be focused on) and suggestive of improper attitudes. Therefore, when Americans want to say “race,” they say “(ethnic) culture.” A society in which one meets people of several races becomes a “multicultural,” ethnically diverse society. This well-meaning conceptual confusion on the popular level is perpetuated by the conceptual confusion reigning among American social scientists, who hold on to the notions brought home by the Germany-returned intellectuals of the turn of the twentieth century, treat “culture” as a residual category for anything not sufficiently understood, and, generally, abstain from defining their terms. In 1924 in Culture and Democracy in the United States, Horace Kallen wrote: “Behind [the individual] in time and tremendously in him in quality are his ancestors; around him in space are his relatives and kin, carrying in common with him the inherited organic set from a remoter common ancestry. In all these he lives and moves and has his being. They constitute his, literally, nation, the inwardness of his nativity.” America, he said, was a “nation of nationalities,” a union less of states, than, in the words of Michael Walzer’s 1990 commentary, “of ethnic, racial, and religious groups.” Kallen’s “organic sets,” explains Walzer, are “cultural, not biological” (Walzer 1990, 593). But how can we equate ethnic, racial, and religious groups unless they have some fundamental principle in common? And since race is fundamentally physical and genetic, we must assume that it is a similar physical or biological quality that makes ethnicity and, especially,
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religion genetically transmitted too, which allows us to place it in the same category as race. Indeed, it is hard to imagine how else but genetically one would contain one’s ancestors in oneself, “carrying in common [with relatives and kin] the inherited organic set from a remoter common ancestry.” It is this sort of thinking that underlies multicultural educational policies in the United States, which encourage teachers to devise assignments requiring students of an elite middle school in the vicinity of Harvard University to “describe the values of their people.” The youngsters, returning home with heavy hearts, know only too well that describing the values of liberal democracy will not do the trick, for it is presumed that the American people do not form a natural community, whose members must all be blood-related (for isn’t that the case in nations such as Germany or France, where everyone is inherently German or French, in religions such as Judaism or Islam, where everyone is inherently Jewish or Muslim, and in continents such as Africa, where everyone is black?) and presumed, therefore, that the American people do not comprise a real people. Instead, they have to undertake ethnographic research into the culinary customs of the country, or more likely one of the countries, from which their ancestors happened to immigrate, and extol, with as much enthusiasm as they can muster, the virtues of, say, kielbasa or haggis. Teenagers, as most parents would immediately recognize, tend towards culinary conformism, in the United States generally preferring all-American hamburgers to ethnic dishes, however delectable; thus, perhaps, “multiculturalism” is a greater burden for them than for other age groups. In general, however, it is very light fare and easy to stomach. For in America, in fact, hard as it may be to believe, culinary diversity lies at the very heart of ethnic diversity, constituting the essence of ethnic culture. Ethnically, Americans are all followers of Feuerbach: they are what they eat. It all boils down to chicken soup, minestrone, and avgolemono. It is quite remarkable how much is invested in “the bread alone,” so to speak. It is virtually impossible today to free oneself from hyphenation; it is not only schoolchildren who cannot identify as “Americans” tout court: the United States Census Bureau insists on everyone acknowledging an ethnicity. Its officials still (or, maybe, again) agree with Kallen that “whatever else [an American] changes, he cannot change his grandfather.” Perhaps not, says Walzer, disagreeing, “but he can … reject [the grandfather’s] customs and convictions.” In fact, nothing less is required, and such
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rejection of customs and convictions – i.e., of cultural traditions – implies much more than the adoption “of a new ‘life-style.’” To become an American one has to foreswear allegiance to all other sovereigns but the people of the United States and “to commit [oneself] to the political ideology, centered on the abstract ideals of liberty, equality, and republicanism.” This alone is enough to undermine “multiculturalism.” For one cannot say that while sharing these ideals, Americans in their daily lives are nevertheless guided by traditions that disregard them and hold other values as supreme. It simply would not do to claim that liberty, equality, and republicanism apply only in politics, while in other spheres of life other ideals hold sway; to characterize, in other words, “the oneness” of Americans, what they have in common, as political, and their “manyness,” what makes for their diversity, as cultural. We know very well that the values of liberty and equality form the foundation of the American family, of the relations between the sexes, of the relations between parents and children, of the economic process, of the ever-simmering social conflicts and of their resolutions, of the developments on American campuses, and more generally and much more profoundly of the life of the mind in America. Only a complete misunderstanding of the nature of human reality – namely, of the fact that all of it is essentially cultural, that politics, as well as economics and social relations, are culturally constructed, and that one’s identity is one’s culture – political, economic, social – in a microcosm. Only a complete misunderstanding of these fundamentals can lead one to the conclusion that “these abstract ideals [liberty, equality, and republicanism] made for a politics separated not only from religion but from culture itself or, better, from all the particular forms in which religious and national culture was, and is, expressed.” Do the sovereigns, allegiances to whom one must foreswear, committing oneself to the ideals of liberty, equality, and republicanism, include His Holiness the Vicar of Christ in Rome? Certainly they do. That is why American Catholics (not Catholic Americans, by the way) are up in arms against their Church, whose hierarchy, supported by the Pope, is unwilling to recognize sexual harassment – a concept that can be understood only in the context of the abstract ideals of liberty, equality, and republicanism – as a cardinal sin. Do these rejected sovereigns include the Lord God himself? Of course, they do. American Protestants protest only as Americans, against the injustices of the secular, political world: as Protestants they live on
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terms of the most intimate friendship with their Catholic and Jewish fellow nationals, all three communities simply could not be more tolerant towards each others’ beliefs, as they are also towards wicca, voodoo, and other less common forms of so-called spiritualism. Who are they to tell others which God to worship and which truth to believe: in accordance with the only truths Americans believe to be self-evident, all gods are created equal. Religion is understood as a style of life, a social club in which one chooses (for reasons of convenience more than anything else) to spend one’s leisure, and in the end all that distinguishes a good American of one faith from a good American of another is when and what one prepares for one’s holiday meals. Unintentionally and effortlessly – in fact, despite the intention and effort to achieve the contrary – religion is stripped of all its moral and vital significance. Its influence is reduced to deciding when to take a day off work and which groceries to buy. And religion is, doubtlessly, the most important of the cultural traditions affecting one’s identity – if it does affect one’s identity – and the hardest to reject. Language, the other main ingredient of “ethnic culture” offers no resistance at all. How many Italian Americans speak Italian? How many Polish Americans know any Polish? How many of them in their lifetimes think of learning these ancestral tongues? The answer is, very few. In this context, too, it is chiefly diet that establishes one’s ethnic affiliation. American “multiculturalism” thus is very much like Henry Ford’s reaction to the suggestion that the Model T should be produced in a variety of colors: “You can have any color you would like, so long as it is black.” Similarly, in regard to the cultural – that is, ethnic – diversity in the United States, the unspoken rule is, “You can uphold any values so long as they are American, practice any religion, so long as it is American, and speak any language, so long as it is American.” You can have any ethnicity, in short, so long as it is American. And apart from that, you can eat whatever you like.
A Vast and Open Society The by and large peaceful coexistence of ethnic, i.e., cultural, groups in the United States, therefore, is not an achievement of skillful conflict management but a reflection of the plain fact that this huge and open society on the deep level, behind its surface of diversity,
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represents one cultural community that, despite the appearance of its population, which suggests great heterogeneity, is based on a fundamental consensus regarding all the important existential questions. The only rift in American society that could ever be described as ethnic arose out of differences acquired by birth. Although obviously culturally interpreted, not culturally constructed, it was in fact based on race. Indeed, for a long period, perhaps lasting throughout the nineteenth century, in the relations between the white and the black populations, in particular, there was a presupposition of that essential, insurmountable foreignness that is characteristic of our attitude to other species of life and of the relations between ethnic communities and nations in the framework of ethnic nationalism. This presupposition of foreignness reflected the suspicion (which very soon came under suspicion itself and led to an agonizing re-examination and self-searching among the white elite, to the abolitionist movement, and finally, to the decisive excoriation of all references to race from the collective imagination of – white – Americans) that the descendents of African slaves were not quite the men who were created equal, that they were in fact a different species of being. After all, they differed so markedly, arriving on the slave ships naked and terrified, both in physical appearance and behaviour from the mankind that white Americans knew either in the Old World (in Europe and Asia) or in the new one (among American Indians). So Jefferson concluded that they did not have the full set of faculties that made one human; that is, they were intellectually inferior. And for statistical purposes one black man was counted as three-quarters of a white man. It should be remembered that precisely the same reasoning was applied to white women: they, too, were physically different from men and, on the whole, behaved differently. Their different behaviour was believed to be a function of their different bodies, reflected in and mediated by the qualities of their minds. A woman, being a different sort of animal, could not be expected to be as reasonable, as intelligent as a man, and therefore could not be trusted to decide for herself to participate in the political process and had to be taken care of, like a slave or a child. In both cases, that of black slaves and that of women, ascriptive biological characteristics for which the individual bore no responsibility whatsoever were made the sole basis of the individual’s social position and ultimate destiny. But in neither case are we dealing with the phenomena of ethnicity and
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ethnic identity, and in neither case were the relations between the social categories thus defined regulated by federal mechanisms. Race was banished from the world view of white Americans; only black people can now mention it and use it as an explanatory concept with impunity. Similarly, no man goes unpunished if he suggests or just raises a question in regard to women’s intellectual faculties and their ability to do everything that men do at least as well. At the same time, it is quite acceptable for women to brag that anything men can do they can do better and in general to undermine the strong sex with their socially validated contempt and derision. American society is guilt-ridden for ever doubting the central tenet of its secular faith, that all human beings are created equal, and for allowing mere physical differences to mislead it into conceiving socially unequal categories. For this reason, purely physical characteristics are considered today the only legitimate ground for special privileges; reverse discrimination is proving to be the symbolically most effective way, however irrational, to expiate the national sin. Policies of affirmative action and equal opportunity, which ensure that a person with an admixture of Black or American Indian genetic material has a better chance of getting accepted into a college or of being hired for a job than a person of equal merit without such an admixture and which make sure that a woman has a better chance than a man with similar qualifications, may appear as devices for conflict management, but they play no such role in fact. There is no possibility of restitution for those who were hurt by discrimination in the past: it is not the same individuals and not even their direct descendents who profit from the reverse discrimination in the present. And the individuals who suffer from reverse discrimination are not the ones who have inflicted the hurt, not even the direct descendents of them – no justice is served by making them suffer. It would be natural for these new victims to become disaffected and bitter and to turn against the physically marked groups to whose benefit, ostensibly, their personal welfare is sacrificed or to turn against the society demanding such sacrifice as a whole. These policies, then, far from managing conflict, may be a source of it. But the symbolic logic behind them, the beautiful symmetry in the fact that those who benefit today are in some – physical – way like those who were discriminated against in the past and in the fact that those who are being discriminated against in the present are like those who were responsible for the past discrimination, appeals to those
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who are not involved in the process directly. It satisfies the bystanders’ desire for consistency, making it seem that the society that sinned was brought full circle to the very source of its goodness, that it has atoned for its sin and has been made good again. There are no conflicts between women as a group and men as a group, for the obvious reason that the sexes do not constitute groups but are merely abstract categories. Nevertheless the “women’s card” is often used in political competition and has been known to win the hearts of men as well as of women. A skillful use of this card is more likely to kindle a conflict, rather than to manage it, but, again, such ideologically fanned conflict is unlikely to be one between people distinguished by the nature of their bodies. In contrast, fault lines in spontaneous conflicts often coincide with racial distinctions, both because of the coincidence of physical characteristics, such as skin colour, with waves of recent immigrants, who usually find themselves on one side of these conflicts, and because of the persisting phenomenon of the black underclass, which usually finds itself on the other side. The appeal to ethnic, ascriptive identity in such cases has the effect of making the existing rifts more profound, in fact conceptualizing, rationalizing, and therefore institutionalizing them.
By way of conclusion Most conflicts in the United States, whether or not they are framed in ethnic terms, result from the systemic pressures of modernity, so strong in this most open of nations, in particular the pressure of the demand for equality, which, on the one hand, produces ambition and envy (the desire to become equal to the best and the desire to defend oneself from a sense of inferiority, respectively) and which, on the other hand, threatens superiority; that is, it creates the fear of becoming equal to those who are socially, economically, and politically below oneself, of becoming downwardly mobile. While they are continuous, these conflicts are generally kept at a low level, because social mobility, which keeps families continuously rotating among social positions, precludes the formation of a core of committed activists and of a pool of ever-available recruits. It is the natural dynamics of American society, an expression of the profound individualism and voluntarism of its national consciousness, that manages conflict in the United States, not specially designed institutions and
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procedures. One cannot reproduce a culture by decree, which makes this great nation not a very realistic model for conflict-torn regions. But one can use the lessons its experience teaches to understand what ethnicity is and what it is not and under which conditions one can – or cannot – expect ethnic coexistence.
9 Autonomy and Multinationality in Spain: Twenty-Five Years of Constitutional Experience Enric Fossas The Objectives of the 1978 Constitution It is not easy to summarize the twenty-five years of Spanish decentralization, because it was an exercise of great political and legal complexity that included several factors and many nuances. It is therefore a very difficult subject to deal with in a satisfying manner within the framework of a conference, where this chapter originated. Moreover, every assessment is always tainted by some subjectivity that is inevitably dependent on preconceived political ideas, as well as inescapable cultural sensibilities. Finally, the time when a study is conducted can influence the evaluation of a historical period, which is the case today, since Spain is at the start of a new political phase characterized by discussions on significant institutional reforms in the matter of decentralisation. Thus the criteria used in this assessment should be made explicit: they concern the objectives that the drafters of the 1978 constitution adopted when tackling the territorial organization of political authority, or to state it differently, they form the Spanish state model. This was a key issue, if not the key issue, of the Constitution, which needed to be debated simultaneously with several other fundamental problems emanating from Spain’s arduous constitutional history: constitutional instability, the succession of documents without legal enforcement, the unfeasibility of including founding principles, as well as the constitutional culture, the question of the monarchy, the separation of church and state, the role of the military in political life,
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and the absence of rights and liberties. The political and social actors of democratic transition needed first and foremost to reach a consensus on these issues. Concerning the model of the state, the objectives of the founders were twofold. First, the old unitary and centralist state, along with its bureaucratic and authoritarian apparatus, which Francoism had carried to its extremes, needed to be transformed into a modern democratic state that would be at once participatory and efficient. This goal was to be achieved during a period when Europe was starting to witness the first symptoms of the crisis of the nation-state. Second, it should not be forgotten that this question has always been linked to what is referred to in Spain as the “national question.” This old and complex problem can be summarized as follows: the nationbuilding effort of the nineteenth century had neither achieved the creation of a stable national community nor managed to dissolve the existing national communities (notably Catalonia and the Basque Country); they had not gained independence, and no constitutional solution (federal or regional) was found to accommodate the national and cultural plurality of Spanish society. More importantly, an organization of power was needed that would be capable of integrating historical nationalities in a common constitutional space while satisfying demands for autonomy as well as recognizing distinct national identities. The results of the double objective of political decentralization and the articulation of multi-nationality should therefore be evaluated in the twenty-five-year assessment of the Constitution. The Constitution has been remarkably successful on the first component of the equation, despite some inadequacies and shortcomings, while the results it has obtained from the second element have been unsatisfactory, so much so that the issue is still unsettled. Since its political transition Spain has accomplished one of the most important and successful decentralization experiments of the twentieth century and has transformed itself from a unitary and centralist state into a system with federal characteristics. This is attested to by the existence of seventeen autonomous communities, whose institutions exercise legislative and executive powers, as well as by the proportion of public spending that they administer (40 percent) and the number of civil servants that they employ (50 percent). As for the second element, even if it is true that the Constitution has enabled Catalonia and the Basque Country to enjoy the longest
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period of autonomy in their history and to regain some elements of their national identity, it is equally true that it is precisely these two communities that manifest, politically and socially, the biggest setback and dissatisfaction with regard to the level of autonomy and recognition achieved through the new Constitution. It is these two communities that formulate, albeit with certain differences, political propositions intended to introduce significant changes to the constitutional order.
The Deconstitutionalization of the State Structure The previous assessment can be explained by the single formula that the drafters have adopted to reach the objectives proposed during the conception of the state’s territorial organization. It is widely known that the end of the constitutional consensus has not culminated in the adoption of a definite model of territorial organization. The Magna Carta has confined itself to establishing certain principles (unity, autonomy), as well as certain procedures guided by the so-called principe dispositif (allowing different paths of accession to autonomy for different territories), in order to allow a decentralization process conducive to the establishment of diverse models. The drafters presupposed what can be referred to as an “apocryphal constitutional compromise,” to use Carl Schmitt’s term, and agreed to delay certain decisions by using a process of differential decentralization (proceso autonómico). This process has led to the formulation of a model that emanates from the Constitution without being specified within the Constitution itself, since the model itself is to some extent deconstitutionalized. Consequently, what should fittingly be called the modelo autonómico is in fact a pre-constitutional model (preceding the Constitution) that nonetheless falls within province of the Constitution. The model is pre-constitutional because the establishment of provisory autonomy rules before the Constitution was even adopted has deeply influenced the drafting of the Constitution and its subsequent permutations. It is also a subconstitutional model because the 1978 Constitution does not create the autonomous communities; does not define the “nationalities and regions” that could become Autonomous communities, nor does it delineate their territory or establish their powers and organization. This is why the constitutional process persists beyond the Constitution and why the political majority within
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the central Parliament (the Congreso de los Diputados, in particular, which is responsible for the approval of the status of autonomy and the financial structure, along with numerous laws delineating competencies) and the jurisprudence of the Constitutional court remain fundamentally in control of “materially” constitutional decisions.
The Stages of the Decentralization Process The autonómico model developed over several stages. The first stage, before 1982, enabled the creation of autonomous communities through various procedures that followed the approval of the statutes of autonomy. This stage then led to the general establishment of these communities by fixing territorial boundaries based on accords negotiated by the two Spanish majority parties – the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) and the Popular Party (PP). The process was inspired by a homogenizing interpretation that has even led to an attempt that had previously been abandoned at harmonizing the decentralization process using the Ley Orgánica de armonización del proceso autonómico (LOAPA, the Organic Law to Harmonize the Process of Autonomy). The second stage, marked by the majority position of a “national” party – the PSOE – led to the political pact of 1992 between the two big Spanish parties. By maintaining the policy of non-differentiation between the communities, this stage has led to the transfer of significant public services and resources to the communities, the approval of numerous state laws delineating competencies, and the genesis of meaningful constitutional jurisprudence. The third stage has been characterized by the loss of the ministerial party’s majority – starting with the PSOE in 1993 and continuing with the PP in 1996 – and the need to secure the support of nationalist minorities within the Spanish Parliament in order to govern the country, in particular the support of the Catalonian coalition C iU (Convergència i Unió). This stage has also been characterized by agreements with nationalist minorities that have enabled a significant transfer of services to all autonomous communities – particularly in matters of health and education – and, in the specific case of Catalonia, the transfer of competencies in the policing of traffic, through article 150.2 CE. It has led to the reform of the central administration, in order to adjust it to the new state structure with LOFAGE, a change that has eliminated the position of civil governor
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while strengthening that of the government’s delegate. It has also resulted in a modification of the financial system with the elimination of 30 percent of the tax on the revenue of “physical persons” (TRPP). The participation of autonomous communities in European politics has also been strengthened through the Conference for Affairs Relating to the European Union and the creation of a position of advisor within Spain’s permanent delegation to the European Union. It should also be mentioned that during the same period and in addition to the above measures, a new reform on the status of autonomy for the majority of the autonomous communities, namely “the slow path communities,” had been initiated by the regional assemblies. It subsequently led to an agreement between the PP and the PSOE within the Spanish Parliament. Finally, the fourth stage started under the PP government, which at first did not have an absolute majority but regained it in 2000 and lasted until its defeat in the elections of 14 March 2004. This stage is characterized by the decline of the proponents of decentralization and the affirmation of a Spanish nationalist discourse, the erosion of democratic institutions and practices, and the adoption of a strategy of confrontation with Basque nationalism, combined with a decline of Catalonian nationalism. All these changes have created a climate of tension in Spanish political life that has been unprecedented in the past thirty years.
The Characteristics of the
AUTONÓMICO
Model
The autonómico model, as it is known today, has evolved through each of these stages. It should be emphasized that an alternative model could very well have been developed with the same constitution. Analysts have tried to fit the Spanish model into traditionally accepted categories and have sought to define it by using different labels such as “unitary-federal,” “federo-regional,” “regionalizable,” and “composite state.” In fact, it is a unique model of a decentralized state that shares similar characteristics with federal states while still remaining very far from classical federal models, as much in its structure as in its function. In addition to shared sovereignty, which is characteristic of the conventional origin of many federal states, it should also be remembered that the idea of federalism corresponds to a certain conception of political power, legitimacy, organization, and functioning, and that it seeks to reach unity through diversity, to
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divide power territorially in order to preserve identity and guarantee freedom, and to establish a form of shared governance that corresponds to political structures and processes. The idea of federalism is well synthesized by Daniel Elazar, who sees in it the expression of territorial autonomy combined with the idea of shared institutions (self-rule together with shared rule). However, when envisioning the organization of the territory and of political power, it is also important to go beyond these theoretical classifications and academic nomenclatures in order to address the more pertinent issue of whether the characteristics of the model emanating from the 1978 Constitution do in fact correspond to the goals set by the constituents. From this perspective, it can be affirmed that the political autonomy granted by the autonómico model to territorial entities is limited or, as is sometimes said, of a low level, because it does not offer them the possibility of developing their own policies in tangible areas that affect social realities. The autonomous communities have to elaborate their policies within the outline of those adopted by the central state. The Constitution has established a framework in which the distribution of powers is vague, while the role of the central state and its competencies is more clearly defined and pre-eminent, both materially and functionally. Several mechanisms that remain under its control – for example, the “residuary clause” – are designed to safeguard the unity of the system. It is also important to note that the Constitution has not divided territorially one of the three powers of the state, the judiciary power, even though it would be possible for the autonomous communities to take on some functions in the administration of justice. These are the constitutional limits imposed on the power of autonomous communities. There are also further constraints imposed on autonomy that emanate from legal interpretation, from Spanish legislators’ application of the constitution, and from the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court. However, these changes were made possible following a previous constitutional decision that deconstitutionalized, for the most part, the distribution of competencies and left them in the hands of the central authority. In doing so, the constitutional decision gradually and seriously undermined the idea of the autonomous communities’ political autonomy. The techniques and mechanisms that curtail the political nature of autonomy have been diverse and numerous: the fragmentation of areas left to the jurisdiction of
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autonomous communities; the enlargement of the powers of the state, which has used them to intervene in virtually all fields, even those that were exclusive to the autonomous communities; the expansion and detailed nature of “basic” central legislation, which prevents the autonomous communities’ “legislative development”; the interpretation of the central state’s executive functions; the use of horizontal competencies (article 149.1. 13 CE, Bases and Coordination of General Economic Planning) or of the clause of article 149.1.1 CE that grants the central state the competency to establish the basic conditions guaranteeing the equality of all Spanish citizens in the exercise of their rights and obligations. These mechanisms lead to increased uniformity in the way the system works for virtually any significant area linked to the competencies of the autonomous communities: from education to commerce, from health to civil service and transportation. The autonomous communities have even witnessed a decline in their capacity for action in fields pertaining to their own internal organization. This is the case for internal territorial organization and local government, which are two fields that are usually under exclusive state jurisdiction in federal systems. From this perspective, a proposal for the development of the Spanish federal model would necessitate a qualitative and quantitative increase in the autonomy of these autonomous communities. This would provide them with a real capacity for autonomous policy-making beyond sharing state power over their territories in some coherent and complete areas, making them fully actualized entities. Given that the system of distribution of powers rests mostly on the central legislator and constitutional jurisprudence, several changes in these two areas would be sufficient to increase considerably the autonomy of the autonomous communities. However, the fact that political majorities, which govern the Central Parliament and reflect legislative elections, also control legislation affecting the central state is undeniable. Constitutional jurisprudence is not easily changed once it has been adopted. The possibilities offered by certain mechanisms put in place by article 150 CE, which make possible the transfer the central state’s competencies to the autonomous regions, should also be considered. But these mechanisms do not guarantee, at least on a constitutional level, the autonomy of autonomous communities, because they do not “constitutionalize” their competencies. In order to accomplish this, an amendment to the distribution of
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powers aimed at guaranteeing political autonomy would have to reform the statutes on autonomy and on constitutional reform. In any case, a more precise delineation of their respective areas of power would, in addition to strengthening regional governments, improve democratic governance by helping to outline the responsibilities that the central state and autonomous communities have towards their respective constituencies. Within this framework, it would also be necessary to include a reform to the system of program financing, which is also for the most part “deconstitutionalized,” in order to grant autonomous communities more autonomy and greater financial independence in the exercise of their competencies, which would, in turn, let them assume greater fiscal responsibility while guaranteeing interregional solidarity. A second feature of the autonómico model that draws it further apart from models of federal states is the fact that it has not been able to integrate the autonomous communities into the central state’s institutions. As was mentioned, federalism is the combination of territorial autonomy with the participation of federal units in central institutions, in order to ensure that the general interest of the state does not remain in the hands of central institutions. This is especially important in the legislative field, and it is also why federal states typically have a Senate that acts as a second chamber to represent the territorial entities, even if this chamber has lost some of this quality because of increasing executive power and intergovernmental relations. The Spanish Senate, although defined as “chamber of territorial representation” by the constitution, is not a truly federal senate. Achieving this status would require significant changes in its composition and functions, which would be difficult without the appropriate constitutional reform for which the political will, at least for the time being, has been lacking. Experience has shown the limits of the ability of purely statutory modifications to transform the senate into a chamber of autonomous communities: such was the case for those adopted in 1994. Given the importance of legislation passed by the central state for the sharing of competencies, the establishment of a federal Senate would achieve this through three objectives. First, it would enable the participation of autonomous communities in the approval of laws affecting areas of their autonomy. Second it would avoid a good part of the conflict over competencies. Finally, it would facilitate the federal expression of the common interest, thus avoiding
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having the latter exclusively defined by the central parliament or the constitutional court. As for this second feature, the Spanish model has also not been able to integrate the autonomous communities into the other broad institutions of the state, such as the General Counsel of judiciary power or the Constitutional Court, in order to insure that they participate directly or indirectly in their composition. For the time being, this possibility depends, for the most part, on the weight of territorial minorities in the central Parliament. Finally, greater integration of autonomous communities into the make-up of entities such as the central bank or the fiscal agency could also be envisioned. Autonomous communities should also participate more actively as intermediaries for policies emanating from the European Union, in particular for policies affecting their competencies, as has been the case in many federal states (Austria, Belgium, Germany). Despite the creation of the Conference on Affairs related to the European Communities and the incorporation of representatives from autonomous communities into the commission’s committees, there are still deficiencies and no mechanisms to integrate representatives from autonomous communities into the Council of Ministers’ Spanish representation (a possibility expressed by constitutional treaties of the European Community that was even the object of two resolutions approved by the Spanish parliament in 1998). I have already shown that the development of federalism in the current model would require increased autonomy and more integration, and several means to achieve both of these goals have been suggested. A federal state is not only a structure but also a process; the adoption of public policies in a system where the executive power is divided and shared requires the introduction of intergovernmental relations, especially in the numerous fields of shared responsibilities. From this perspective, the Spanish state presents a very significant deficiency in comparison to federal systems, which would require the establishment of horizontal and vertical mechanisms of coordination and cooperation. Based on these characteristics, it can therefore be concluded that the model of autonomous communities developed in keeping with the 1978 constitution has significantly weakened the idea of autonomous communities’ “political” autonomy by failing to articulate their participation in the policies of the central state’s institutions, which have expanded to almost every area of social, economic, and
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political life. To remedy these deficient characteristics in the future, there should be more autonomy and increased integration in order to move the autonómico model closer to one that is purely federal. However, the establishment of a federal system in a given country does not depend exclusively on constitutional norms or on the organization of institutions but also requires particular conditions to support the political and social system and, more importantly, feed the political culture. Countries with a federal tradition have not only organized power along pluralistic lines but have also reached a situation where the political system as a whole and society function in a federal manner. This state of affairs has shaped the mentality of individuals in such a fashion that citizens have become accustomed to “think in a federal manner,” accepting naturally the plurality of decision-making centres and, consequently, the established territorial diversity of politics. From this perspective, Spanish society, as well as the parties representing it, still applies uniform and centralist frameworks, because federal culture has yet to penetrate them. “National” political parties continue to view the path to federalism as a threat to national unity, while “nationalist” parties think that their political aspirations cannot be satisfied in such a system. On this level, there needs to be a profound evolution of political culture, as well as mentalities, which can only come with time.
Accommodation of Multi-nationality and Asymmetry A third characteristic of the territorial model has developed out of the constitution of 1978, one that is related to the second aim of the constituents: the accommodation of historic nationalities (and more specifically Catalonia and the Basque country) in a constitutional and democratic state. The constitution’s preamble refers to the intention to protect the “peoples of Spain,” “their culture and their traditions, their language and institutions,” and the text distinguishes between “nationalities” and “regions” (article 2), in addition to establishing multilingualism (article 3). However, the constitutional norm never directly recognizes the identity of cultures, nationalities, and languages. Despite the advances that have been made in this field, the autonómico model still suffers from major deficiencies when it comes to the recognition and accommodation of national pluralism in symbolic and institutional spheres and in the area of
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shared competencies. It seems clear after twenty-five years of applying the constitution that any proposal for the territorial organization of Spain can ignore the existence of territorial communities, which, in contrast to other regions, define themselves as “nations” and demand political autonomy in order to maintain and develop their distinct collective identities. One should also not forget that these aspirations are expressed through political forces – nationalist, federalist, or sovereignist – that are strongly implanted in their territories and that are influential in the Spanish political system, in spite of the profound political, social, and cultural differences between Basque and Catalan nationalisms. There have been frequent attempts to reduce the constitutional treatment of this multi-national reality to exclusively judicial terms, thanks to the idea of hecho diferencial (differential fact), an ambiguous concept that is legally useless and charged with political preconceptions. In reality, the most important differential fact is not legal, because it is made up of the explicit desire for more autonomy expressed by those communities with national bases and roots that are historical, social, and cultural. Those communities do express themselves in political terms, however, and seek to be distinguished from other territories that represent themselves as regions of the Spanish nation. It is this democratic will for political autonomy and recognition as distinct national communities that should be translated constitutionally by treating distinct realities in an asymmetrical manner. The solutions for the articulation of multi-nationality are one thing, while the techniques for federating power are another. While the latter require more autonomy and greater integration, the former include more recognition of differences and, consequently, a new asymmetrical articulation of different national realities. For this reason, measures in this field should be centred on symbolic and cultural aspects and require changes not only to the regulation of the state’s official languages but also to a number of questions affecting citizens’ national identity. The political and constitutional debate associated with the experience of decentralization in Spain has created the link between asymmetry and multi-nationality, which demonstrates the importance, on the one hand, of political identity and the different approaches between Catalan and Basque nationalisms, and of majority nationalism on the other. As has already been mentioned, this is essentially an extremely difficult political issue, rather than solely a legal one, and advances can be made only when attitudes have changed and significant time has passed.
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A Nuanced Appraisal Any appraisal of twenty-five years of constitutional experience in Spain must be nuanced: the development of the constitution represents a notable success, but important problems still remain to be tackled. In terms of decentralization, the constitution has completely transformed the state’s territorial structure, but it has also developed a model that does not constitutionally guarantee the autonomy of autonomous communities, since it still remains under the control of central power, does not grant them a real political autonomy and does not envision their integration into the central institutions or policies of the state. On this issue, the autonómico model has to evolve towards a federal model, and this will be achieved by providing further political autonomy for autonomous communities and by facilitating greater political participation on their part in central policies and institutions. As for the integration of historical nationalities, while it is true that the constitution has enabled Catalonia and the Basque Country to enjoy the longest period of autonomy in their history and to recapture some of the elements shaping their collective personalities, it has neither reached the stage where their distinct national identity is constitutionally recognized nor established asymmetrical mechanisms to accommodate multi-nationality in symbolic and institutional areas that pertain to shared competencies. It is therefore paradoxical that after twenty-five years of constitutional history precisely these two communities that currently express their unease and propose political projects permitting significant changes to the constitutional order. It should be underlined, however, that these projects are very different: the Basque Country’s Ibarretxe plan (to propose a political association between the Basque country and Spain) enjoys the support only of nationalists and defends a status of free association with Spain; it is closer to the one proposed by sovereignists during the 1995 Quebec referendum. In Catalonia, however, all the political forces inside the regional parliament seek an agreement to reform Catalonia’s Statute of Autonomy without modifying the Spanish Constitution. I suggested, at the beginning of this chapter, that the summary of any historical period is conditioned by the moment when it closes. This summary is probably influenced by the latest political phase undergone by Spain under the conservative governments of the Popular Party, which has included a step backwards in terms of
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decentralization, a rupture of the constitutional consensus, and strong tensions emerging with historical nationalities. However, the change in political circumstances that emerged after the latest Catalan elections (16 November 2003) and the Spanish general elections (14 March 2004) offers a new panorama filled with hope in which the constitutional consensus, so indispensable to undertaking the necessary constitutional and statutory reforms, can again be attained. Nevertheless, only a political agreement between the current nationalisms would be able to solve the “national question” and achieve the desired success of the Spanish constitutional experiment.
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Contributors
Editors Alain-G. Gagnon is professor in the Department of Political Science at the Université du Québec à Montréal, where he holds a Canada Research Chair in Canadian and Québec studies. He is also director of the Centre de recherche interdisciplinaire sur la diversité au Québec (CRIDAQ) and a founding director of the Research Group on Plurinational Societies. His publications include Multinational Democracies, edited with James Tully (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001); The Conditions of Diversity in Multinational Democracies, edited with Montserrat Guibernau and François Rocher (Montréal: IRPP 2003); Québec: State and Society (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2004); and The Case for Multinational Federalism (London: Routledge 2010). André Lecours is associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Ottawa. His main research interests are nationalism, with an area focus on Western Europe, and institutionalist theory. He has published articles in Nationalism and Ethnic Politics (2000), National Identities (2001), International Negotiation (2002), Politique et sociétés (2003), Canadian Public Policy (2004), Comparative Political Studies (2005), and Nations and Nationalism (2006). He edited New Institutionalism: Theory and Analysis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2005) and is the author of Basque Nationalism, forthcoming at the University of Nevada Press in 2007. Geneviève Nootens teaches political philosophy at the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, where she holds the Canada Research Chair on Democracy and Sovereignty. She is the author of Désenclaver la démocratie:
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Des huguenots à la paix des Braves (Montréal: Québec Amérique 2004). She edited “Philosophie et politique: Réflexions québécoises sur la mondialisation et la diversité” in Bulletin d’histoire politique (2004), and she contributed a chapter to National Cultural Autonomy and Its Contemporary Critics (London: Routledge 2005).
Chapter Authors James Bickerton is professor in the Department of Political Science at St-Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, where his research focuses on regional development and regionalism and Canadian federalism. He has just begun researching reforms to Canada’s public health care system and is the author of Nova Scotia, Ottawa and the Politics of Regional Development (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1990), co-author with Alain-G. Gagnon and Patrick Smith of Ties That Bind: Parties and Voters in Canada (Toronto: Oxford University Press 1999), and co-editor of Canadian Politics, 5th edition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2009) with Alain-G. Gagnon. ángel Castiñeira, who received his PhD from the University of Barcelona, is professor in the Department of Social Science at ESADE (Escuela superior de administración y dirección de empresas) in Barcelona. Until September 2004 he was director of the Centre d’Estudis de Temes Contemporanis (CETC) attached to the Catalan government’s Presidency Bureau and editor of the journal IDEES . John Coakley is professor at the School of Politics and International Relations of the University College, Dublin, in Ireland. His research interests are comparative politics, Irish politics, and ethnic conflict. He is coeditor of The Social Origins of Nationalist Movements (Sage 1992), Politics in the Republic of Ireland, 3d ed. (Routledge 1999), and The Territorial Management of Ethnic Conflict 2d ed. (Frank Cass 2003). Alain Dieckhoff is research director at the Centre d’études et de recherches internationales (CÉRI) at the Institut d’études politiques in Paris. He holds a doctorate in political sociology from Paris-X Nanterre University. His research interests focus on politics in Israel and on the relationship between politics and culture in contemporary nationalisms. He has published La nation dans tous ses États: Les identités nationales en mouvement (Paris: Flammarion 2000), La constellation des appartenances: Nationalisme,
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libéralisme et pluralisme (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po 2004), and Revisiting Nationalism: Theories and Processes, with Christophe Jaffrelot (London: Hurst 2005). Louis Dupont is director of the Space and Culture centre and professor at Paris IV – Sorbonne University. He is editor of the journal Géographie et Cultures and director of the editorial board for the series Géographie et Cultures. His publications include “Les États-Unis: La guerre culturelle continue,” in André Gamblin, ed., Images économiques du monde (Paris: Sedes 2004), and Une multitude de Canadas (Les Presses de l’Université de Valenciennes, 2000), co-authored with Nathalie Lemarchand. Enric Fossas is professor of constitutional law at the Unversitat Autònoma de Barcelona and research director at the Institut d’Estudis Autonòmics de la Generalitat de Catalunya. He is the author and editor of numerous books: Les transformacions de la sobirania i el futur polític de Catalunya; Asimetría federal y Estado plurinacional; El derecho de acceso a los cargos públicos; Regions i sector cultural a Europa; and Lliçons de Dret Constitucional, along with scientific articles. He has been a visiting scholar at universities in France, Italy, Canada, and the United States and is a regular contributor to newspapers such as El País, La Vanguardia, and El Periódico de Cataluña. Liah Greenfeld is professor in the department of political science at Boston University. She is the author of The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth (2001); Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity; and Different Worlds: A Study in the Sociology of Taste, Choice, and Success in Art. Her research focuses on nationalism and its political, social, and economic repercussions. She is currently working on two major projects: the first is on the intelligentsia, national consciousness, and political change in contemporary Russia, and the second explores the nature of culture. John Loughlin is professor at Cardiff University, Wales. His research focuses on regionalism and European federalism, sub-national democracy, religion and politics, French politics, and the transformation of governance. His most recent publications are Culture, Institutions and Economic Development: A Study of Eight European Regions, published by Edward Elgar in 2003 (with Michael Keating and Kris Deschouwer), and Subnational Democracy in the European Union: Challenges and Opportunities, published by Oxford University Press.